ABSTRACT

Travel-writing is both a very popular and a very old form of writing. Before the nineteenth century, it moved easily between fiction and nonfiction, between fantasy and reality. Anna Jameson, writing in Characteristics of Women (1832), believed that Shakespeare, for instance, found inspiration for his last play, The Tempest, from accounts by Sir George Somers of the Bermuda Islands where Somers and his companions were shipwrecked in a terrible storm, and who brought back:

Jameson's text here highlights the very conflict which reveals the ambivalent nature of travel-writing as a discourse but also reveals how the two versions could produce the dichotomy on which the play functions and depends.