ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the re-enactment of the journeys of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century pioneers' have gone on to shape contemporary ethnosexual tourist-local encounters and how they are a crucial part of the global trend towards postcolonial travel in the early twenty-first century. In Britain at least, much of the credit for the revival of interest in Victorian and Edwardian women travellers goes to the feminist publisher Virago Press who in 1983, reprinted the books written by Isabella Bird, Mary Kingsley, Gertrude Bell, Emily Eden, Lucie Duff Gordon, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the Virago Travellers Series, and hailed them as feminist pioneers'. Mills and others argue that Victorian and Edwardian women's travel literature has been the focus of a discovery of sorts because it was hidden for many years. In addition women's writing was also qualitatively different from their male counterparts because of their ambivalent relationship to the project of colonialism.
