Julia Pardoe

Her most popular work, The City of the Sultan and Domestic Manners of the Turks (1837), presented the Ottoman Turkish upper class with sympathy and humanity.

[1][2] Her father served in the Royal Waggon Train in the Peninsular campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars and fought at Waterloo before retiring from the service.

[4] She began writing at an early age[1] and anonymously published her first work, The Nun: a Poetical Romance, and Two Others (1824), at the end of her teens.

[1] Pardoe fell victim to insomnia and chronic liver disease and died on 26 November 1862 at Upper Montagu Street, London.

[4] She also published further novels: The Confessions of a Pretty Woman in 1846, The Rival Beauties in 1848, Flies in Amber in 1850, Reginald Lyle in 1854, The Jealous Wife in 1855, Lady Arabella in 1856, A Life-Struggle in 1859 and The Rich Relation in 1862.

[4] Previously, Europeans had an aggrandized view of the Ottoman Turkish people, but Pardoe's work presented its upper class with sympathy and humanity.

[4] According to The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art in 1857, her Hungarian travelogue compares favourably with her earlier books on various cultures, exhibiting "deeper research; its statistics are peculiarly accurate, and it is on all hands admitted to be one of the best books of travel submitted to the public.

[3] In 1858, J. Cordy Jeaffreson stated in Novels and Novelists that Pardoe had been "favourably circumstanced for the development of her intellect," for "delicate health at an early part of her life secured her the quiet retirement necessary for meditation and study, and her extended travels have supplied her susceptible mind and retentive memory with the best possible materials for thought.

From their infantine years they have been celebrated for a love of books: for the perseverance which marked their pursuit of knowledge: for intense industry in their studies, and the eagerness with which they followed that which had become the end and aim of existence.

"[2] He concludes that Pardoe's life and entire literary career, "its industry, its perseverance, and its unswerving continuance, are beyond all praise, as they are worthy of all emulation.

Gülbahar Rabia Altuntașː The Material Culture in the Istanbul Houses Through the Eyes of British Traveler Julia Pardoe (d. 1862).

Julia Pardoe
Julia Pardoe book frontispiece with her signature at the bottom.