Women, Writing, and Travel in the Eighteenth Century by Katrina O'Loughlin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women, Writing, and Travel in the Eighteenth Century by Katrina O'Loughlin Mona Narain Katrina O'Loughlin, Women, Writing, and Travel in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2018). Pp. 208. $99.99 cloth. In this valuable study, Katrina O'Loughlin argues that travel writing provided women a unique opportunity to enter eighteenth-century contemporary debates and to voice their public opinions. These literary interventions also gave women writers the opportunity to construct a feminine identity based on emergent notions of sociability and cosmopolitanism, though class and politics remained important mediators for such constructions. Understandably, then, examining contemporaneous gender norms both in British society and in foreign cultures was a significant preoccupation for the writers examined in the study. As they recounted journeys to new places, these women used cultural differentiation as a means to shed light on gender constructions as well as to critique gender practices through comparison. In the last three decades, scholars have demonstrated that the popularity, publication, and readership of women-authored travel writings' rose substantially between 1770 and 1820, a development that broadly followed British women's increased mobility due to the expansion of British trade and colonization across the globe. Recent bibliographic research bears out and expands these insights. In an analysis of the Database of Women's Travel Writing between 1780 and 1800, Benjamin Colbert identifies approximately thirty-seven publications by women writers at Britain, at least seven more than previously believed to have been published during this period. Addressing Colbert's findings, Carl Thompson now estimates that between 1690 and 1800, there were probably about forty travel accounts published by women writers.1 Considering the various implications and consequences of this period of increased production is important for several reasons. A sustained analysis of women's travel writing in this period is vital to the comprehensive study of travel writing and women's literary history; to understanding the components of [End Page 124] eighteenth-century literary publics; and to theorizing cross-cultural encounters and the constructions of the British nation and identity in this time period. O'Loughlin addresses several of these aspects in her study of six women-authored travel accounts. She has selected the particular accounts under consideration in the book for their authors' innovations to the genre of travelogues, travel along new routes and description of territories previously unexplored by other travel writers, or role in marking a shift in the literary and critical discourse of the time. O'Loughlin uses the metaphor of a "paper globe," a phrase borrowed from Mary Wollstonecraft, to capture the various dimensions of women's travel writing, and the expansion of knowledge it represented in the long eighteenth century (3–4). The book begins with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's The Turkish Embassy Letters (1763) as something of an ur-text for British women's travel writing. Montagu was not the first English woman to publish a travel account—that credit goes to Elizabeth Justice, whose Voyage to Russia, published in 1739, is discussed in chapter four. Yet O'Loughlin marks the publication of Embassy Letters in 1763 as an important moment in the literary history of the genre and women's writing, given the Embassy Letters' sustained popularity well into the nineteenth century, as was marked by multiple editions. O'Loughlin also points to the simultaneous circulation of the Embassy Letters in both manuscript and print, which complicates analysis of both intended audience and reception. Through her selection of texts, O'Loughlin demonstrates the gradually expanding geographical reach of British women, beginning with Montagu's account of her travel through Europe and Turkey, followed by the Journey through Crimea to Constantinople (1789) of Lady Elizabeth Craven, who went further afield in the Levant than Montagu. These works were followed by Jane Vigor's Letters from a Lady Who Resided Some Years in Russia (1775) and Elizabeth Justice's Voyage to Russia, both of which describe travel through Europe and Asia. The last two chapters in Women, Writing, and Travel in the Eighteenth Century, on Janet Schaw's Atlantic Journal (1921) and Anna Maria Falconbridge's Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone (1794), show the increasing British interaction with...