Julia Pardoe

Julia Pardoe (4 December 1804 – 26 November 1862) was an English poet, novelist, historian and travel writer. Her most popular work, The City of the Sultan and Domestic Manners of the Turks, presented the Ottoman Turkish upper class with sympathy and humanity.

Life Julia Pardoe book frontispiece with her signature at the bottom.Julia Sophia H. Pardoe was born in Beverley, Yorkshire. She was the second daughter born to Major Thomas Pardoe, who was said to be of Spanish extraction, and his wife Elizabeth. 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. She began writing at an early age She was inspired by her travels with her father to publish The City of the Sultan and Domestic Manners of the Turks in 1837. The magazine also noted the usefulness of Pardoe's The Hungarian Castle (1842), which consists of three volumes of Hungarian folklore, "filling up a very little known page in the legendary history of Europe".

Joseph Johnson included Pardoe in his Clever Girls of Our Time: And How They Became Famous Women (1862). His piece on her begins, "With few exceptions, Famous Women have all been Clever Girls. 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."