ABSTRACT
Mary Nisbet’s loving and often worried letters to her parents during her stay in the East show very clearly the extent of the financial support of her husband’s ambassadorial duties and political negotiations, as well as of the removal and transport to England of the Parthenon marbles. Her letters from her travels in Greece and extended stay in Athens directly reveal the personal, political, and cultural significance of the violent removal of the marbles from Greece to Britain. In her letters from 1799 to 1805, tracing her journey to the East and her stay in France before returning to Britain, her own life writing becomes entangled with the cultural biography of the marbles taken from the Parthenon and eventually sold by Elgin to the British nation. Nisbet fulfils the expectations raised by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s representation of the forbidden spaces of the East, and at the same time exceeds them by reaching the highest levels of the Ottoman court.
