ABSTRACT
This chapter charts some key notions concerning femininity, class, and national identity which emerged forcefully within travel writing and other cultural forms in the pre-Revolutionary era, and which crucially informed British responses to developments in France. It examines the problematic relationship between women's travel writing and these more proscriptive genres, to show both the pressures and the freedoms which travel writing could provide to women seeking a published voice. The chapter then focuses on Mary Wortley Montagu's account of Europe and Turkey in the light of a later, critical response to the Embassy Letters published by the redoubtable yet scandalous Lady Craven in 1789. It also focuses on several accomplished middle-class women travel writers, including Hester Piozzi in 1789, whose works reveal the extent to which the status and capabilities of women are becoming central planks in British national identity during the 1770s and 1780s.
