British Women Travellers: Empire and Beyond, 1770-1870, edited by Sutapa Dutta

Abstract

Reviewed by: British Women Travellers: Empire and Beyond, 1770–1870 ed. by Sutapa Dutta Meg Dobbins (bio) British Women Travellers: Empire and Beyond, 1770–1870, edited by Sutapa Dutta; pp. viii + 246. London and New York: Routledge, 2020, $160.00, $44.05 ebook. Part of the Routledge Research in Gender and History Series, British Women Travellers: Empire and Beyond, 1770–1870 offers an intimate glimpse into the understudied lives and writings of a diverse group of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British women travelers. The collection will be received enthusiastically by anyone interested in travel writing, women’s writing, and historical and cultural studies of the British Empire. Perhaps the greatest strength of this fresh and accomplished volume is its gendered elaboration and historical situating of the inherently nebulous genre of travel writing in the context of British imperialism. The editor Sutapa Dutta makes the case in a framing introduction that women’s travel narratives from 1770 to 1880 provide a “unique refractive perspective” on British imperialism and colonial rule (4). Beyond recovering the words and experiences of individual women writers of the period (itself a worthy undertaking), this volume aims further to illuminate British women’s contributions to Western and Anglocentric forms of travel, mobility, and imperial knowledge-making in the decades during which Britain was coming into imperial world power. Readers will come away with a deeper understanding of how British women travelers contributed to and shaped important cultural, scientific, religious, and material colonial discourses of the time. The chapters offer close readings of an impressively diverse range of public and private genres of women’s travel narratives including travel guides, memoirs, published and unpublished letters, cookery, and proto-ethnographic and archaeological writings on a variety of stimulating topics. In a laudable effort to track British women travelers across as many continents and in as many countries as possible, the volume is broken down into three parts focused on Europe, the British colonies, and settler colonies. There are many benefits, and perhaps a few inevitable drawbacks, to this geographical structuring. In the first section especially, on British women’s travels throughout the Continent, it is not always clear how or if the chapters intend to address the larger questions of British imperial knowledge and discourse posed in the introduction. In an excellent chapter on Elizabeth Inchbald’s travels to France in 1776, for example, Ben P. Robertson makes the persuasive case that Inchbald appropriated French culture for British consumption. The word “colonise” is deployed here as a synonym for other kinds of adaptation, translation, and cultural commodification (21). Yet when the chapter turns to consider Inchbald’s awareness of specific colonial affairs in India (evidenced by her 1784 drama The Great Mogul and the fact that she briefly contemplated immigrating to India herself), the differences among these various modes of appropriation come to feel significant. How—and why?—did Inchbald’s capitalizing on French culture lay the groundwork for her cultural colonization of India later on? In this chapter, as in Barbara Tetti’s fascinating account of British archaeological engagements with Roman monuments and ruins, British views of India are touched on but not fully integrated into discussions of British tourism throughout the Continent. Reading Tetti’s chapter, one wonders how the nascent archaeological notion of time that evolved in travel narratives written by Katherine Elwood and Judith Montefiore in Rome further developed when these women headed to the Middle East and India; unfortunately, this chapter concludes right at this exciting juncture before any such connections [End Page 461] can be made. Overall, then, while chapters in this section of the book do a wonderful job recovering the writings of individual writers and elucidating forms of British identity and culture that emerged vis-à-vis women’s travels in the Continent, the larger framework of the British Empire sometimes falls out of view. One of the central and perhaps most provocative contentions of this volume is that British women’s travel writing was not “radically different” from men’s. As Dutta asserts, it is “time to relinquish the idea of searching for a ‘feminine’ perspective in the writings of women writers, or a ‘feminine’ perspective of the world” (6). Some...