ABSTRACT
My concern in this article is with the ‘collective effort’ and ‘collective history’, seen in terms of discursive formations, which determined the production of British women’s travel writing within the colonial period, and which led to women’s travel accounts being written in a different way to men’s writing of the period. The women’s travel writing which I am considering here is that written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries about countries which had been colonized by Britain. This period is one where there was an upsurge in travel writing by such women as Mary Kingsley, Nina Mazuchelli, Isabella Bishop Bird, Lucie Duff Gordon and many others. Their travel writing is not easily categorizable, ranging as it does in terms of position from the staunchly pro-colonial to the openly anticolonial, and in terms of narrator from the indomitable, adventuring hero to the seemingly fragile feminine figure.2 However, despite this seeming diversity, there are elements which appear in these texts which do not appear in male travel writing; it is this difference which I trace to a different range of discursive constraints.
