Virtuous Voyages in Penelope Aubin's Fiction

Penelope Aubin's fiction incorporates elements from two popular genres of her day—travel fiction and the amatory novel—and adds to this melange a strident Christian morality. The result is that her narratives often realign the gender assumptions on which both travel and amatory fiction are based. Her female-centered travel narratives feature pious heroines endowed with endurance and fierce resourcefulness. Though her work also reveals the problematic position of Christian women within the grand imperial subtext of travel literature, Aubin does offer an alternative model of female adventure to early-eighteenth-century readers that blends piety with pleasure, thrill with theology.