ABSTRACT
It has been argued of eighteenth-century literary culture that travel writing was not only seen as acceptable for women to author, but was also positively recommended to female readers as an instructive form of literature.1 Samuel Johnson and James Boswell categorized the writing of ‘voyages and travels’ in opposition to ‘manly’ forms of literature such as the works of ‘ancient writers’, and women’s travel narratives were ‘generally welcomed by reviewers’ for the different perspective they offered on what were often ‘well-worn itineraries’.2 As Jacqueline Pearson has reflected, such promotion of the literature of travel to women is surprising considering that it ‘seem[s] to constitute a classic example of reading as escapism’ in a period when female imagination continued to cause anxiety, and offered women the opportunity, both through writing and reading, to ‘criticize an anglocentric, patriarchal status quo’.3 However, the association of the epistolary and journal travel formats with privacy and, therefore, femininity, would certainly have helped to reconcile the literary marketplace to women’s participation in the genre. The fact that female travellers expressed their experiences of travel through the letter-writing and diarykeeping practices that were so strongly associated with the routines of home and family gave the travelogue a reassuringly domestic feel, despite the actuality that it was born of the experience of the foreign.
