"We travellers are in very hard circumstances. If we say nothing but what has been said before us, we are dull and have observed nothing. If we tell anything new, we are laughed at as fabulous and romantic"
About this Quote
The subtext is sharper: the audience’s idea of “truth” is provincial. What counts as believable isn’t determined by what happened, but by what fits existing European expectations. “Fabulous and romantic” are not neutral adjectives here; they’re dismissals that feminize and trivialize testimony, a way to downgrade observation into fantasy. Coming from Montagu, a woman navigating elite salons and masculine intellectual authority, the complaint carries extra bite: it’s about who gets to be taken seriously as an interpreter of the world.
Context matters. Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters (written during her time in the Ottoman Empire) challenged popular European caricatures of “the East,” especially around women’s lives. She had access many male travelers didn’t, and she knew that access would be met with suspicion because it disrupted the accepted script. The sentence doubles as strategy: by naming the trap, she pre-emptively disarms it. She invites the reader to notice their own reflex to demand novelty and then punish it, turning travelogue into a mirror for the culture consuming it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Travel |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Montagu, Mary Wortley. (2026, January 16). We travellers are in very hard circumstances. If we say nothing but what has been said before us, we are dull and have observed nothing. If we tell anything new, we are laughed at as fabulous and romantic. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-travellers-are-in-very-hard-circumstances-if-115293/
Chicago Style
Montagu, Mary Wortley. "We travellers are in very hard circumstances. If we say nothing but what has been said before us, we are dull and have observed nothing. If we tell anything new, we are laughed at as fabulous and romantic." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-travellers-are-in-very-hard-circumstances-if-115293/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"We travellers are in very hard circumstances. If we say nothing but what has been said before us, we are dull and have observed nothing. If we tell anything new, we are laughed at as fabulous and romantic." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-travellers-are-in-very-hard-circumstances-if-115293/. Accessed 10 Feb. 2026.
