ABSTRACT
The act of recovery for feminist literary scholars assumes a kind of movement: progressing forward, shifting ideologies, exploring new paths, expanding outwards, and finding new spaces for women writers. This chapter explores the complexities of such movement by focusing on a genre that embraces movement in both literal and figurative ways: the travel narrative. It discusses the travel writing of proto-feminist radicals Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley. Wollstonecraft and Shelley present their own politics of location, grounded in their experiences of travel, and the precarious compromise between prudence and imprudence necessary for a woman writer to be successful. The chapter examines the role of prudence in defining women’s moral behavior and in crafting texts for a reading public. Where these women travel and how, what their eyes see, and what they publish reveal their own struggles between a radical feminist politics and the inherent conservatism of the prudence necessary for women to move in unfamiliar spaces.
