“Having lived much in the world”: inhabitation, embodiment and english women travellers' representations of russia in the eighteenth century

Abstract

This article examines representations of Russia in the travel writings of British women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using a mid-nineteenth- century text, The Englishwoman in Russia, to introduce the more familiar racialised models of difference deployed by imperial travel writers, the article connects these with two mid-eighteenth-century travel texts by virtue of the women writers' shared preoccupation with the female body as a sign of national culture, and cultural difference. Through a reading of Mrs Vigor's Letters from a Lady (1775), and Eliza Justice's Voyage to Russia (1746), it is argued that images of the female body are not only significant as a mode of cultural negotiation for foreign bodies and practices in this period, but that strategic “inhabitations” of Russian culture contribute to the women travellers' production of themselves as national and authorial “subjects” within their published texts.