ZOE KINSLEY, Women Writing the Home Tour, 1682-1812.

Abstract

IN examining women’s writing and travel experiences in Britain during the long eighteenth century, Zoë Kinsley tells a subtle story of how intersectionality and cultural engagement shaped feminine and British identities of the period. Her work in Women Writing the Home Tour, 1682–1812 confronts the generic questions surrounding travel writing, and does so in ways that illuminate the scholarly importance of travel writing and women writers’ responsiveness to traditions of manuscript and print circulation. Travel writing as a method of organizing, framing, and communicating an often disorderly experience seems necessarily concerned with questions of classification and order; thus, Kinsley begins with a detailed examination of the organizational strategies of women’s travel texts and their relation to Enlightenment habits of classification. Kinsley points to the classificatory concerns of lexicography, cartography, and encyclopaedia production of the period to emphasize the goal, shared among these pursuits, of using strict organizational systems to establish authority for their definitional projects. In women’s travel writing, the field of knowledge to be organized is the mind and memory, as incidents and observations crowding the brain are disciplined into coherence and classificatory authority by organizing one’s writing and by the act of writing itself. Kinsley’s focus on the organizational strategies adopted by women travel writers thus constitutes a simultaneous examination of the drive towards objectivity and instruction in travel writing of the period and of the textual choices available to and developed by the women writers she discusses.