Next Steps: Recovering the Arthurian Past in Women’s Travel and Topographical Writing

Abstract

Women’s travel writing and topographical poetry provided rich ground for Arthurian allusions in the Romantic period. By reading the travel narrative as a malleable literary space, Garner argues that its flexible boundaries allowed women to offer antiquarian assessments of Arthurian sites without encountering hostility from critics. A range of travel texts and topographical poetry by Mary Morgan, Anne Wilson, Louisa Stuart Costello, Felicia Hemans, Eleanor Anne Porden, Anna Sawyer, and Mary Russell Mitford is examined. As part of its attention to places and spaces, Garner also addresses the nationalist impulse at stake in treatments of the Arthurian myth and concludes that English women poets ultimately failed to appropriate the legend successfully in their verse.