ABSTRACT
This study offers a genealogy of British women’s travel literature in the period 1840-1914. Despite the range of texts produced about women travelling to Greece, remarkably little is written about these texts. Robert Eisner, in the only study of Anglophone travel to Greece, states that there is ‘a lack of good work by and about women’s Greek travel’ (Eisner 1991, 228). Relegating British women’s literature on Greek travel as especially derivative compared with their male counterparts, he identifies the 1950s as a redeeming period since ‘[t]he women writers on Greece get down to the smells of a place and they write about the people from the inside, the hearth and bedroom, instead of, like the men, from the outside, the café and taverna’ (Eisner 1991, 229). Explaining the strength of women’s writing as the ability to observe the minutiae of domestic life, he reads careful detail of the private sphere as a privileged form of visual and descriptive penetration. However, the present study charts a group of women who began to travel in the wake of Greek independence, whose questions and observations of what the new Greek nation meant extended far beyond the home. This book considers archaeologists, anthropologists, scholars, authors, journalists and tourists, using their Greek travel as a constituting factor for a genealogy of a diverse group of British women who engaged with the real site of Modern Greece as a means of exploring women’s role in the public sphere.
