Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784–1814

A history of the writing of mobility in the Romantic period, through the work of major women writers.

Ingrid Horrocks (Author)

9781316633380, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 11 July 2019

307 pages, 6 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15 x 0.2 cm, 0.4 kg

'… this study brings welcome attention to some less familiar texts and performs a skilful rebalancing of the critical literature on 'distressed women' in Romantic writing-amply demonstrating their significance to emerging perceptions of 'an increasingly mobile world'.' Robin Jarvis, The BARS Review

In the last days of the Scandinavian journey that would become the basis of her great post-Revolutionary travel book, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote, 'I am weary of travelling - yet seem to have no home - no resting place to look to - I am strangely cast off'. From this starting point, Ingrid Horrocks reveals the significance of representations of women wanderers in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, particularly in the work of women writers. She follows gendered, frequently reluctant wanderers beyond travel narratives into poetry, gothic romances, and sentimental novels, and places them within a long history of uses of the more traditional literary figure of the male wanderer. Drawing out the relationship between mobility and affect, and illuminating textual forms of wandering, Horrocks shows how paying attention to the figure of the woman wanderer sheds new light on women and travel, and alters assumptions about mobility's connection with freedom.

Introduction: reluctant wanderers
1. 'Circling eye' to 'houseless stranger': the shifting landscape of the long poem
2. The desolations of wandering: Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets
3. 'The irresistible force of circumstances': the poetics of wandering in Radcliffean Gothic
4. 'Take, o world! thy much indebted tear!': Mary Wollstonecraft travels
5. 'No motive of choice': Frances Burney and the wandering novel
Coda: 'He could afford to suffer': losses and gains.

Subject Areas: Gender studies: women [JFSJ1], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]