ABSTRACT
Travel writing was a form which, because of its broad generic status, allowed women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century a platform from which to present their opinions about the controversial topic of revolutionary politics. This chapter focuses on travel accounts by Helen Maria Williams, Mary Shelley and Dorothy Wordsworth to explore their expression of political arguments. Taking an ecofeminist standpoint, this chapter argues that for these influential authors, the natural world was central to their vision of the formation of political agency and also a way of expressing ideas about politics in their writing. Using the Alpine landscape of Switzerland as their backdrop, the authors discuss the history of the region and their own views on contemporary European society.
