ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that when both the physical practice and the literary recreation of leisure travel were being reinvented, the brief evocations of bad inns and failed domesticity helped at least some women to represent both travel and travel writing as properly feminine pursuits. "The continual recurrence of bad inns is enough to wear out the patience of the reader, as well as the traveller", Jane Waldie laments, explaining why she does not have much to say on the subject. Yet in many later eighteenth-century works about travel, inns, good and bad, make frequent appearances. As early nineteenth-century leisure-class women traveled and wrote about those travels, their willingness to encounter and endure bad inns thus implicitly troubles their claims to embody the sort of refined, domestic femininity, claims that were simultaneously being reinforced by their insistence on their receptiveness to sublime landscapes or beautiful art.
