ABSTRACT
In Penelope Voyages, her foundational study of women’s travel writing, Karen Lawrence argues that the genre was especially appealing to female authors because it offered ‘a set of alternative myths or models for women’s place in society’ and ‘a particularly broad spectrum of generic possibilities.’ 1 That is, travel itself allowed the woman author to experience and describe models of women’s lives that interrogated those paradigms prevailing in her home culture, while the fluidity of travel writing as a genre provided an opportunity to experiment both by taking on different writerly selves and by presenting subjects through a range of formal lenses. As Lawrence and others have shown, it was this range of experience and opportunity that made travel writing such an appealing genre to women writers throughout the nineteenth century. In particular, it led to a proliferation of women’s travel narratives during the early Victorian years, when visiting the American experiment in democracy allowed British travelers to examine processes of social change in the new world that were becoming increasingly relevant to issues at home. Harriet Martineau, even more than such contemporaries as Frances Trollope and Anna Jameson, embraced the possibilities that travel made available, combining an exceptional range of subject matter with an ongoing use of the genre to explore fundamental elements of her social philosophy and so assert her own potential as a contributor to the intellectual life of the period.
