This book is about a largely overlooked woman travel writer, an author whose texts merit scholarly attention yet tend not to receive it, even in the most appropriate contexts. To give but two examples, in the recently published Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature (Fludernik and Nandi, 2014), there is a chapter on Victorian travel writing, and in another work devoted to similar issues – Leisure and the Irish in the Nineteenth Century (Lane and Murphy, 2016) – there are essays on ‘Leisure in Literature’, ‘Leisure, Tourism and Travel’ and ‘Leisure and Female Élites’. None of these mentions Marguerite Blessington's two travel accounts, The Idler in Italy (1839– 40) and The Idler in France (1841). Blessington's works are relevant examples in every way, yet they are not familiar enough today to be included, even though they were popular among readers in her time, and the author's life and activities have been of interest to today's scholars. The idea that lies behind this book is thus to propose a critical reading of Marguerite Blessington's four travel narratives, and to broadly contextualize them within social, cultural and literary phenomena of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Marguerite Blessington's first recorded journey, to the Isle of Wight, took place in 1820. In 1822 she anonymously published a journal from the tour – A Tour in the Isle of Wight in the Autumn of 1820. In 1821 Blessington made a relatively short tour of the Continent, the anonymous account of which, Journal of a Tour through the Netherlands to Paris, in 1821, also appeared in print in 1822. In the same year Blessington commenced her proper Continental tour, which continued until 1830. This long- lasting journey resulted in the publication of two travel accounts – the three- volume Idler in Italy in 1839 and 1840, and the two- volume Idler in France in 1841. There was a gap of almost 20 years between Blessington's early and later texts. What is more, her Continental tour lasted nearly a decade, and the account of it was published 10 years after its completion. That interval of 20 years was not only an eventful period in Blessington's life but also in the history of British tourism.