British Women Travellers and Travel Writers, 1820s– 1840s

Although women had travelled long before the nineteenth century, it was then that travelling became fashionable among them (Korte 2000, 111). With the improvement of travelling conditions, it was no longer considered too inconvenient and dangerous for them, and so they could well accompany men on their tours, as Mary Shelley, Lady Morgan, Frances Jane Carey and many others did. Sometimes they would travel as caretakers to their relatives, like Mariana Starke, or as governesses, as in the case of Anna Jameson. Nevertheless, over time, an increasing number of women travelled solely for their own sake. Just as men did, they would travel for many reasons, including self- development.

A great number of British women going to the Continent considered their journey to be an educational one, their Grand Tour. They followed the traditional itinerary, on their way devouring travel books by their predecessors, as, for instance, Mary Shelley did. Drawn by their classical and artistic interests, they would visit the cities where they could best refine their tastes, just like Charlotte Eaton, who went to Florence and then to Rome and described its ‘creations of gifted genius’ in her book Rome in the Nineteenth Century (1820, 1: 148). Others aspired to broaden their knowledge of European manners and culture by staying for a longer time in European capitals and surrounding themselves with members of Continental elites. Frances Trollope sojourned in Paris, where she was admitted into the salons of the cosmopolitan aristocracy, as recorded in her Paris and the Parisians (1836). Finally, for some women travel was a chance to deepen their professional knowledge (Frawley 1994, 22). Louisa Stuart Costello, for instance, specialized during her travels as a historian studying medieval France.

Notwithstanding their educational goals, women also participated in the increasingly popular leisure travel. The idle traveller, commented upon in a rather critical manner by Laurence Sterne in A Sentimental Journey Though France and Italy from 1768 (Sterne 2002, 14–15), began to take on positive connotations from the turn of the eighteenth century. Idleness was embraced by those who recorded their travels to define their state of mind while on tour.