text:  With the exception of Lady Mary Wortley Montague's piquant sketches of the Turkish hareems and their inmates and the singular narrative of her personal experience of life in an Indian zenana by _Mrs Meer Hassan Ali_ [16] we know no female writer who has enjoyed such opportunities for the delineation of the scenes of domestic privacy of the East and who has so well availed herself of them as the sister of _Mansoor Effendi_ in the pages before us