ABSTRACT
Recent attempts to include women in histories of geography have often drawn on the work of women travel writers in the British empire. Research to date has tended to focus on discourse theory, and the spatial context of the journey has been somewhat neglected. In their efforts to assert that travel writing is an essentially gendered form of representation, several theorists have failed to recognize the complexities in the varying responses to and depictions of overseas territories by women travellers. This paper emphasizes the importance of the regional context of the journey by analysing landscape descriptions in the narratives of Victorian women travellers in West Africa. It explores how women travel writers contributed to the popular geographies of West Africa in Victorian Britain and, more specifically, investigates the extent to which the images contained in their narratives were informed by, or challenged, Britain’s myth of the “Dark Continent” during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. It also analyses how the temporal context of the journey, the evolving nature of British imperial culture, and contemporaneous ideas about romanticism, “wilderness” and “sanctuary”, were important factors in the landscape descriptions of West Africa by women travellers.
