This book studies the exclusive refractive perspectives of British women who took up the twin challenges of travel and writing when Britain was establishing itself as the greatest empire on earth. Contributors explore the ways in which travel writing has defined women’s engagement with Empire and British identity, and was inextricably linked with the issue of identity formation. With a capacious geographical canvas, this volume examines the multifaceted relations and negotiations of British women travellers in a range of different imperial contexts across continents from America, Africa, Europe to Australia.

Women move through the world differently from men. The constraints and perils, the perceptions and complex emotions women journey with are different. For many women, the inner landscape is as important as the outer. This does not mean that the woman traveller is not politically aware, historically astute or in touch with the customs and language of the place, but it does mean that a woman cannot travel and not be aware of her body and the limitations her sex presents.

Beginning with the publication of the first Murray guidebook to Greece in 1840 and ending with Virginia Woolf's journey to Athens, this book offers a genealogy of British women's travel literature about Greece. Churnjeet Mahn recounts the women's first-hand experiences of the sites and sights of antiquity, analyzing travel accounts by archaeologists, ethnographers, journalists, and tourists to chart women's renderings of Modern Greece through a series of discursive lenses. Mahn's offers insights into the importance of the Murray and Baedeker guidebooks; how knowledge of Greece and Classical Studies were used to justify colonial rule of India at the same time that Agnes Smith Lewis and Jane Ellen Harrison used Greece as a symbol of women's emancipation; British women's production of the first anthropological accounts of Modern Greece; and fin-de-siècle women who asserted their right to see and claim antiquity at the same time that the safety of the independent lady traveler was being called into question by the media.

Drawing on long-neglected travel writings by British women in India, this study looks at different aspects that women focus on as opposed to men, particularly in their encounters with Indian women in the zenana. Located at the cross-roads of feminist theory and colonial discourse theory, the book examines the power relations inscribed into the traveller's gaze.

During the long nineteenth century, British women reframed the masculine paradigm of the Grand Tour. They created a feminist travel gaze, intentionally or unintentionally, that differs from male peers. Unlike their brothers, who went in search of educational refinement, those who could departed from their English homes for the great Italian cities of Florence, Naples, and Rome to escape personal disappointments and the social limitations posed by parents, spouses, and society. The opportunities and anonymity of travel to a distant land and new-found freedoms fostered a hybrid female persona who could fulfil her personal and creative ambitions. Their significant achievements, entrepreneurial journalism, literary masterpieces, and social advocacy for their gender redefined the contours of the Anglo-Italian cultural landscape and travel for women. The historical evidence presented here testifies to the life- changing nature of travel and firmly demonstrates how British women’s history and literature enriches and broadens narratives about Britain and the World.

In the late eighteenth-century, elite British women had an unprecedented opportunity to travel. Taking travel home uncovers the souvenir culture these women developed around the texts and objects they brought back with them to realise their ambitions in the arenas of connoisseurship, friendship and science. Key characters include forty-three-year-old Hester Piozzi (Thrale), who honeymooned in Italy; thirty-one-year-old Anna Miller, who accompanied her husband on a Grand Tour; Dorothy Richardson, who undertook various tours of England from the ages of twelve to fifty-two; and the sisters Katherine and Martha Wilmot, who travelled to Russia in their late twenties. The supreme tourist of the book, the political salon hostess Lady Elizabeth Holland, travelled to many countries with her husband, including Paris, where she met Napoleon, and Spain during the Peninsular War. Using a methodology informed by literary and design theory, art history, material culture studies and tourism studies, the book examines a wide range of objects, from painted fans “of the ruins of Rome for a sequin apiece” and the Pope’s “bless’d beads”, to lava from Vesuvius and pieces of Stonehenge. It argues that the rise of the souvenir is representative of female agency, as women used their souvenirs to form spaces in which they could create and control their own travel narratives.

Accompanies the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from July 7 - October 31, 2004