The Turkish Lady is a poem about love in unlikely circumstances. An English man is a slave to a woman in Turkey. The two fall in love, but due to their different social classes and religions, they cannot initially marry. As a persoal sacrifice, the Turkish woman renounces her faith in Islam and becomes a Christian, freeing her Christian English slave and moving with him to England. While this story is not historically accurate, it is perhaps a metaphor for the drop in social status of a woman in Scottish and/or Western societies when she would marry a man of a lower social standing. While marrying a man of a higher social class has been a common form of social mobility for many women in patrilineal societies, marring a man of a lower class would have been a personal sacrifice that demoted the social class of an individual. Extracting this idea and portraying it in a foreign location may have allowed Scottish readers to better undertand this social trend in their society by isolating it from their society altogether. Having this story be between a rich Muslim woman and an enslaved Christian Briton may have been a way to also reinforce the superiority of British peoples and their faiths, as it was (in this story) worthy for one to sacrifice her social standing and religious affiliation in order to be with a poor Englishman.