Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women's Travel Writing

Women experience and portray travel differently: Gender matters - irreducibly and complexly. Building on recent scholarship in women's travel writing, these provocative essays not only affirm the impact of gender, but also cast women's journeys against coordinates such as race, class, culture, religion, economics, politics, and history. The book's scope is unique: Women travelers extend in time from Victorian memsahibs to contemporary road girls, and topics range from Anna Leonowens's slanted portrayal of Siam - later popularized in the movie, The King and I, to current feminist descripting of the male-road-buddy genre. The extensive array of writers examined includes Nancy Prince, Frances Trollope, Cameron Tuttle, Lady Mary Montagu, Catherine Oddie, Kate Karko, Frances Calderón de la Barca, Rosamond Lawrence, Zilpha Elaw, Alexandra David-Néel, Amelia Edwards, Erica Lopez, Paule Marshall, Bharati Mukherjee, and Marilynne Robinson.
«The contributors to this book are well aware of the complexity of gender and the way that gender operates in different ways in different contexts. The women travelers considered here do not have much in common since they are divided by historical period, privilege, class, race and wealth, but it is the diversity of the women represented which is the book's greatest strength. Although the women do not write in the same way as each other, gender nevertheless manifests itself clearly and makes its presence felt, and we are able to see the way gender operates in particular contexts. This book enables us to move away from assuming that women travelers write in a particular way or in a particular style, with certain themes predominating and toward a type of contextualized analysis, which is subtle enough to unpick the intricacies of the way gender operates.» (Sara Mills, Professor of Linguistics, Cultural Studies, Sheffield Hallam University)