Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia

Abstract

Daughter of Stephen Woulfe, chief baron of the Irish Exchequer, Mary became the second wife of Lieutenant–Colonel (later Sir) Justin Sheil in 1849. She went with him to Persia where he had been serving in the British legation since 1836 (he was minister from 1844 to 1853) and where she bore him three children. Lady Sheil published Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia in 1856, and it has been designated the first travel book on the country by a woman. Her narrative of the deposition and murder of Nasir al-Din's first Prime Minister, Amir Kabir Mirza Taqi Khan, is used as a primary source for this incident by Abbas Amanat in his biography of the Shah, Pivot of the Universe (Amanat 1997). An observant writer on her own account, she made full (sometimes verbatim) use of her husband's dispatches, especially with regard to the section in her book on the Babi movement which provides one of the earliest published accounts on the sect by a European. From: Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia (1856) Lady Sheil's account of Babism explains this manifestation of acute social and religious unrest in Qajar Persia as the work of socialists, communists and anarchists, ‘the opinion shared by almost all of the European colony in Tihran in 1850–52’ (Momen 1981: 5).

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