ABSTRACT
Beginning by examining Champney’s Vassar Girls series alongside contemporary reviews, this chapter shows that the aim of the books was to acquaint girl readers with foreign geographies while engaging them with stories of intrigue; the novels also reveal American women’s humanitarian capabilities in a wider world. Focusing on Three Vassar Girls in England (1884), the chapter investigates the cross-cultural exchanges that occur when the girls mingle with British society, correcting assumptions about Americans while changing their views of the British. Particularly, the girls interact with England as readers, feeling intimately acquainted with British poetry and fiction. Champney’s novels, likely a palimpsest of her own travels overlaid with fiction, raise the fascinating question, on two levels, of what it means to use a novel as a guidebook abroad. Champney encourages this conjunction of fact and fiction and thereby supports her own agenda: using fiction as a vessel to open readers’ minds to further study and larger truths.
