In search of the rare and the beautiful – two female English travellers’ journeys to mid-nineteenth-century Hungary

Abstract

ABSTRACTFew English female travel writers ventured to Hungary in the middle of the nineteenth century. This article considers two travel memoirs, published respectively in 1840 and 1869, within the historical context of travel writing by women and examines how the opportunity of overseas travel impacted on Julia Pardoe and Julia Clara Byrne’s self-image. It also investigates the style and content of their travelogues and seeks to answer to what extent these writers contributed to the contemporary travel literature and what images they transmitted about the eastern domain of the Habsburg Empire. It concludes that far from being simple guide books, the two accounts reveal the intellectual and emotional journeys of two intrepid travellers who, by setting an example, endeavoured to draw potential tourists to this part of the Continent.