ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a reading of the travel narratives published by Mary Wollstonecraft and Robert Southey as the eighteenth century drew to a close. Mary Poovey has compared the Letters to The Prelude, claiming as venerable a position for Wollstonecraft as for Wordsworth within the genre of 'romantic autobiography'. Karen Lawrence has contrasted Wollstonecraft's trenchant analysis of 'the workings of gender and class ideology as it operates throughout Scandinavian society' with the more conventional, high-political focus of previous accounts of Northern Europe. Some of Wollstonecraft's most significant precursors as authors of Northern European itineraries are notable for their self-conscious gallantry, or, one might more aggressively contend, their sexual imperialism. Both Wollstonecraft and Southey were motivated by financial need, and the lucrative potential of travelogue. Southey consistently denigrates Spanish and Portuguese epic poetry in favour of the British tradition: 'there is more genius in one of the old metrical Romances than can be found in all the Epic Poems of Portugal'.
