ABSTRACT
Lady Elizabeth Craven is preoccupied with other women's lies. This chapter examines Craven's A Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople, as well as her Memoirs. It identifies how Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters both legitimatises Craven's authorship and threatens to render her Journey less authentic. Landry argues that Craven's attitude towards Montagu is 'self-serving'. Women travellers who wrote could not escape the figure of Montagu. Montagu's influence on Craven is both enabling and constricting. Montagu's vision of Vienna, as related to her female respondents is of a romantic 'feminitopia'. They are primarily women-only spaces where no men are allowed apart from 'the old Grand Master'. Montagu often falls into romantic raptures over the women that she meets, and in doing so she draws on typical classical and aesthetic tropes to describe the women. Craven's erasure of Montagu indicates a historical paradigm shift in relation to social relations that is in the process of taking shape.
