Women, Writing, and Travel in the Eighteenth Century

A wide-ranging exploration of women's travel writing between 1714 and 1789, emphasising women's contribution to processes of cultural change.

Katrina O'Loughlin (Author)

9781107459335, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 25 June 2020

288 pages
23 x 15.3 x 1.5 cm, 0.45 kg

'Impressive in its geographical scope … this valuable contribution to studies in travel writing reanimates crucial voices in eighteenth-century literature and culture. Women, Writing, and Travel in the Eighteenth Century would interest scholars focused on alternative literary histories of subjectivity (as distinct from the novel), premodern travel writing, women's writing, eighteenth-century colonial discourse, the emergence of a secular middle class, politics and British aristocratic identity, eighteenth-century Russia and the Levant, and more.' Laura Williamson Ambrose, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal

The eighteenth century witnessed the publication of an unprecedented number of voyages and travels, genuine and fictional. Within a genre distinguished by its diversity, curiosity, and experimental impulses, Katrina O'Loughlin investigates not just how women in the eighteenth century experienced travel, but also how travel writing facilitated their participation in literary and political culture. She canvases a range of accounts by intrepid women, including Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters, Lady Craven's Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople, Eliza Justice's A Voyage to Russia, and Anna Maria Falconbridge's Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone. Moving from Ottoman courts to theatres of war, O'Loughlin shows how gender frames access to people and spaces outside Enlightenment and Romantic Britain, and how travel provides women with a powerful cultural form for re-imagining their place in the world.

'The paper globe': women, writing, and travel in the eighteenth century
1. 'A very diligent curiosity': Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Embassy Letters
2. 'Wrecked on seas of ink': publicity and sovereignty of taste in Lady Craven's Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople
3. 'Entre nous': the sociability of feeling in Jane Vigor's Letters from a Lady in Russia
4. 'No small wonder to see myself in print': virtuous commerce and Eliza Justice's A Voyage to Russia
5. 'My Travels have been to the Moon and the Stars': Janet Schaw's journal and Atlantic sociability
6. 'Thorns and thistles': Anna Maria Falconbridge's Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone
Conclusion. La 'Dame pensive'.

Subject Areas: Classic travel writing [WTLC], Travel writing [WTL], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]