Modern Travel on the Fringes of Empire

Abstract

As ‘armchair travellers’, eighteenth and early-nineteenth century readers of women’s travel writing were assumed to be living vicariously through books by Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762), Lucie Duff-Gordon (1821–1869), and Hester Stanhope (1776–1839), whose journeys were enabled by male relatives in diplomatic service. By the 1880s, aristocratic authors were increasingly eclipsed by prominent middle-class women writers who travelled brazenly unaccompanied by British men. Travel books in turn gained a set of different functions, representing experiences newly within the reach of middle-class readers. Cook’s Tours to the once impossibly exotic regions of Egypt and the Middle East, for instance, became popular in the 1870s and 1880s. And since traveling inherently involves negotiating one’s independence, the genre also emerged as an ideal medium for challenging the very idea of gendered spheres of authority for women. As Sara Mills indicates, women’s travel books were ‘potentially extremely subversive since they portray women characters as strong, active individuals in stark contrast to their representations in novels, plays, and poetry of the time’. These books created a new legitimacy and widespread respect for women travellers and new roles for women in an age of unprecedented imperial expansion, to which scientific exploration and travel in the late Victorian era were inextricably linked.