ABSTRACT
A key feature in the many best-selling domestic novels of Mary Jane Holmes is the heroine’s willingness and even eagerness to travel. Holmes treated open space and travel as a worthwhile experience. Her biographers report that she and her husband took yearly voyages abroad, and it seems obvious that Holmes’s own experiences as a world traveler informed her enthusiasm for moving her heroines to unfamiliar spaces. But it is not only her adulthood travels that figure largely in her novels; in most of the novels she published between 1854 and 1907, it is easy to see that details about her own girlhood are quite similar to the backstory of her many heroines. What is especially notable in her own life is the gulf between girlhood and adulthood; it must not have seemed likely that a young girl such as Mary Hawes, born into a large, rural, poor family, would grow up to be a famous, globe-trotting novelist. But this is the story she tells her readers again and again—that the circumstances of girlhood may present economic, intellectual, social, and moral challenges, but exposure to new people, other cultures, and strange places can be the route to a personal transformation.
