The conclusion to the Female American – specifically, its celebration of an ideal domestic order achieved not in England, but on the unnamed island where the heroine was shipwrecked – challenges many of the assumptions that condition the structure and meaning of eighteenth century travel fiction. As the previous chapter's discussion of Bancroft's Charles Wentworth confirms, travel fiction's critique of the metropolitan culture through the contrasts provided by encounters with otherness is most often closed down by the hero's retirement to an English estate. There, the disruptive energies that precipitated his original quest are assimilated to existing hierarchical orders as territorial and acquisitive impulses, once directed outward toward the unknown, are reconstructed within the province of marriage and agrarian capitalism. The Female American resists this final recentering on England, and in so doing exempts its protagonists from definition by the customary forms of authority that prevail in novels like Charles Wentworth. The Female American is, in other words, a travel fiction that sustains to the end the utopian and feminist project asserted in its opening pages.

Its concluding gesture toward a sentimental ideal of relationship – a domestic order configured through affective bonds rather than exclusionary property relations – aligns The Female American with numbers of other late eighteenth-century fictions that draw on utopian themes to define their sense of community. Part III will focus on two particular versions of such collectivism, both defined by female membership.