Women Writing Travel

Abstract

This Virtual Special Issue brings together several essays published in Forum for Modern Language Studies between 2015 and 2017 that in various ways address the topic – and the phenomenon – of ‘Women Writing Travel’, focusing on anglophone writers. Reading them as a group enables us to find in their many intersections a powerful incentive to continue scholarship and teaching in this productive field, not least because it speaks beyond the academy to important cultural and political questions. As a graduate student in Oxford in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I worked on eighteenth-century British women travel writers, many of whom were then largely unknown. Since then, they have received copious critical attention and are firmly on the map (and on many university syllabi).1 Their nineteenth-century counterparts have enjoyed a similar movement towards the centre of the literary canon in recent decades, thanks to scholars such as Sara Mills and Shirley Foster, and the work of Virago Press in republishing many important early works.2 Conference panels on women travel writers became for a while ubiquitous, and have only recently become outnumbered by more thematic examination of different (though related) interests such as gender, sexuality, race, slavery, empire and – above all – intersectionality. The world of ‘women writing travel’ has always been intersectional, of course, in terms of the writers’ gender, sexuality, marital status, race, religion, national identity, class and profession, even before the vast array of themes and preoccupations brought together under the umbrella of ‘travel’ are considered. One thinks, for instance, of the importance of rank in Mary Wortley Montagu’s access to Turkish high society in her 1763 Embassy Letters, and, at the other end of the social spectrum, of Mary Wollstonecraft’s status as a Dissenter and an unmarried mother in her 1796 Scandinavian travelogue. Several early anonymous travel novels – The Female American (1767), The Woman of Colour (1808) and Zelica, the Creole (1820) – feature mixed-race or Black female protagonists. Many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelogues, especially those by missionaries’ wives, are inflected by their writers’ religious convictions, but sometimes in surprising ways.3 And the celebrated labouring-class women pirates of the eighteenth century are fascinating case studies in the intersecting roles of class, gender and sexuality.4