ABSTRACT
This chapter examines three literary texts from the 1870's that exploited the literary potential of the foreign grave motif in very different ways that include: Ordered South; Longstaff's Marriage and Daisy Miller. A striking motif in nineteenth-century texts concerned with the practice of travel for health is the image of the foreign grave. The discourse of therapeutic travel provided a shared social context for the storytelling about climate in which a range of medical, journalistic and literary texts from the period 1825-1890 were involved. 'Change of air' was one of the most commonly prescribed environmental therapies used in the nineteenth century to treat symptoms, both physical and mental, which resisted pharmaceutical or surgical cure. Robert Louis Stevenson's well-known autobiographical essay Ordered South was first published in 1874. 'Ordered South' is a literary exercise in pathos, redeemed from sentimentality by its mystical speculations on the nature of selfhood.
