Since Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite’s Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770–1840 (2002), scholars have given status to sites of conversation and conviviality: the dinner, the salon, the publisher’s drawing room. Sociability also opens up generically, emphasizing manuscript circulation, correspondence, the periodical, and travel writing. O’Loughlin takes this program a step further, situating sociability within the framework of “sociality,” “those historically specific forms of social competence that mediate between personal subjectively and group identities.” This allows her to consider sociability alongside other social markers such as taste or, later in the eighteenth century, sensibility. Travel writing by women tests how sociability and sociality help configure women’s self-representations of and participation in social space.While sociability, sociality, subjectivity, and identity are touchstones, O’Loughlin also undertakes to address the “expansion and professionalization of women’s writing”; her selections represent larger trends from the mid-eighteenth century when women increasingly challenged the gendering of travel as masculine. Gender becomes “a form of critical difference” in which the body centers and makes difference legible through clothing and ornamentation, sensibility and sexuality, and establishes authorial presence in the traveler’s response to motion, climate, and other bodies. This somatic multivalence becomes crucial to the female travel writer’s authority as a reader of cultural difference. In the wider argument about sociality, the body becomes a “currency” with the power to normalize or make normative the author’s subjectivity within social relations.Of the six writers treated––Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lady (Elizabeth) Craven, Jane Vigor, Eliza Justice, Janet Schaw, and Anna Maria Falconbridge––Montagu is the best known and, in this study, strikes a keynote, not least because her Turkish Embassy Letters spans the century, from circulated manuscript to posthumously published travel book to echoes and allusions abounding in later travel writings. The Montagu chapter focuses on the “coterie readership” that developed around her circulated manuscript as well as the larger cosmopolitan impulse behind her comparative approach to British, European, and Ottoman female subjectivity. The well-known Turkish seraglio and bagnio scenes, in which female bodies appear arrayed in expressive finery or stripped of overt status, mark out the sociable ideal in Montagu’s larger cross-cultural enquiry. Rather than reproducing women as aesthetic objects, Montagu endows them with agency and authority as producers of taste. O’Loughlin also attends to the often overlooked European half of the journey in these terms, linking excessive adornment and artificiality to authoritarian politics, while opening the space for aesthetic refinement and beauty to reflect a natural balance epitomized in Ottoman female society.Following partly in Montagu’s footsteps, Lady Craven also visited the seraglio in Constantinople on her Crimean journey (1785–1788) and Horace Walpole encouraged her to publish her account. Her willingness evinced her “more comfortable” self-consciousness as author in an “enlarged sphere of public writing” than her predecessor. It also allowed her to compensate for the notoriety surrounding her extramarital relationships with the public currency of the travel book, choreographed to “reposition herself as a cosmopolitan subject entitled to the protections of rank in Europe” in the face of scandalous newspaper-mongering at home. Her “elite subjectivity” takes different forms than Montagu’s, including landscape appreciation and sensibility, but through these means Craven endorses contrasting values. She locates authority in ancien régime culture rather than the Whiggish “republic of letters”; European, hereditary aristocracy replaces Montagu’s relativism vis à vis the Ottoman world; and Craven’s Journey contests Montagu’s Letters in covert and open warfare. Rejecting Montagu’s homosocial vision of women in the bagnio, Craven brandishes a peculiar weapon of denunciation in the second edition of her Travels: “I was convinced not only Lady Mary Montagu had not written those letters, but they were most of them male compositions.”The next two chapters consider Jane Vigor and Eliza Justice, both writers on Russia in the 1730s. The wife of successive diplomats at St. Petersburg, Vigor depicts a feminized sociality of feeling in those circles. Her Letters from a Lady, however, enters print culture in 1775, decades after the events to which it refers. Justice’s more contemporary Voyage to Russia (1739), by contrast, positions Vigor (then Lady Rondeau) as a woman “with every perfection to be wish’d for” but well outside the social circles of Justice, a governess. These chapters chart sociality vertically across class and social rank, and engage with the emergence of a professional middle-class voice in women’s travel writing. Justice’s case is poignant. Her position in Russia followed her separation from an unscrupulous bookseller husband, whose debts and neglect had led to periods of financial privation. Justice returned from Russia in 1737 to assert her claim for an annuity her husband had ceased to honor, only to find he had been transported to America for stealing books from Cambridge University Library. Her decision to defend her own character in print, as O’Loughlin persuasively argues, turns on books: “the value and meaning of books as subjects of human sociality... in opposition to her husband’s use of these (non) commodities.” Analyzing the book’s publication by subscription and its paratextual apparatus, O’Loughlin shows how Justice deploys the Voyage strategically as a personal and political intervention on the meaning of “marriage, commerce, and social virtue.”In the book’s final pairing, Schaw and Falconbridge move beyond Europe to consider American, West Indian, and African encounters between British women and racialized others. These chapter trace the darker side of sociality, in which sensibility endorses as much as challenges slavery. Schaw’s Journal describes a voyage in 1774 to chaperone her brother’s children to the West Indies where he was to take up a government post. With a strong sense of a homeland (Scotland) rooted in shared conversation and feeling, Schaw extends these values to the world of commerce and exchange, but privileges an elite subjectivity that preserves social hierarchies. While the trade in slaves disturbs Schaw, the domesticity of plantation slavery “contains the possibility of ideal sociality,” even though slaves themselves are written “outside the very conditions of modern subjectivity.” In Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone (1794), similarly, Falconbridge positions herself as the modern subject whose ill-treatment by her abolitionist husband calls into question the abolitionist project itself. Exploiting parallels between her shipboard confinement and those of slaves on the middle passage, in one example, Falconbridge shifts attention from the sufferings of black bodies to her own and the Narrative consistently imposes “a hierarchy of subjectivity” in which white women out-feel others: “Falconbridge ultimately rejects the slave body... as unsubject to feeling.”O’Loughlin misses the fact that Schaw’s and Falconbridge’s “racialization of cultural difference” has precedent in Montagu, who remarks on the “natural deformity” and unnatural adornments of North African women (letter 50). Yet such slips are rare and not telling. Rather, her portraits of her travel subjects––like Jean-Etienne Liotard’s pastel drawing La Dame Pensive (c. 1749) that illustrates the book’s cover and informs its conclusion––are less appreciations than complex, multi-dimensional analyses of their “inscription of gender as a form of authority” in travel writing. O’Loughlin’s added attention to the personal and political strategies behind these investments will make her book valuable to readers charting women’s increasing presence in the travel publishing marketplace well into the nineteenth century.