The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration: Contested Subjects (review)

Abstract

In recent years a cottage industry has grown up in Victorian studies around the female traveler and her relation to the enterprises of Victorian colonization and imperialism. Studies on women travelers have done much to highlight crucial distinctions between male and female roles in imperial contexts. In her original and ambitious book The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration, Rita S. Kranidis shifts the lens of such inquiry away from the traveler and onto the unmarried female emigrant and the unique position she occupied in reference both to her home and to her colonial destination.