Στη χώρα του φεγγαριού: Βρετανίδες περιηγήτριες στην Ελλάδα (1718–1932) (review)

Vassiliki Kolocotroni and Efterpi Mitsi can tell a good story. Admittedly, their subject is a gift. Anthologized in this irresistibly readable volume are 19 British female travelers who visited Greece between 1718 and 1932. Some are precociously talented, a few larger than life.

There is Mary Wortley Montagu, daughter of the Marquis of Dorchester, who taught herself Latin when women of her class were expected to read only sentimental romances. Montagu plunged headlong into London’s intellectual and court society, and then accompanied her husband on his embassy to Constantinople (1717–18). Afflicted with smallpox in 1715, she was subsequently heavily satirized, but in the 1720s she campaigned hard for smallpox vaccination, already used in the East.

Hester Stanhope, whom Byron portrayed as “that dangerous thing—a female wit,” was the daughter of Charles, Earl Stanhope, dubbed “Citizen Stanhope” for his republican convictions. She could not tolerate his highly strung personality and left the family home to play hostess to her uncle, Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger. This was a position of tremendous influence in the center of the British establishment, and many strived to get her ear. Following Pitt’s death, and an unhappy love affair, Stanhope traveled abroad. She was shipwrecked off Rhodes, and began dressing herself in men’s attire. In Syria she behaved extravagantly, and was the first European woman to visit ancient Palmyra, where she was welcomed in a lavish reception. Syria at the time was torn between two feuding chiefs, but Stanhope defied both and sheltered dozens of refugees in her own house. Muhammad Ali, the mighty Ottoman viceroy, allegedly said that Stanhope was more troublesome than any of the insurgents he ever faced.

Semitic scholar Agnes Smith Lewis was unable to attend university, as women were not admitted to degree programs. With her twin sister, Margaret Gibson, Smith Lewis discovered in 1892–93 the “Sinaitic palimpsest,” the second known manuscript of the Old Syriac version of the Gospels. She endowed Westminster College and a lectureship in modern Greek at Cambridge as well.

Emily Beaufort, whose Eastern Shores of the Adriatic in 1863 (1864) was published under her married name, Viscountess Strangford, is still compelling reading for Albanian and Balkan history though not as commanding as Edith Durham’s work, which does not feature in the volume under review here.

Also included is Emilie Isabel Barrington who wrote the first major biography of the painter Frederic Leighton as well as one of James Wilson, her father and founder of The Economist. Barrington also edited the complete works of the important Victorian commentator Walter Bagehot in nine volumes, the tenth being his biography (1915). And, of course, there is Virginia Woolf with two contributions, one from an early visit, and another from a more able and interesting account of 1932, just over a quarter of a century later.

You see the temptation: editors will attempt to drive home that female travel writers produced writing which challenged the colonial ethos of the British empire. Modern readers will test these offerings as examples of the more “sensual” and less logocentric mode that has come to be identified as typically feminine in recent decades. But it is gratifying that Kolocotroni and Mitsi do not make unwise forays into facile theorizing. They are adamant that gender bears upon (travel) writing, but they also acknowledge the fact that female authors were not impervious to colonialism because of their sex, an assertion that is right on both scores.

Although the book is too inclusive to make up a single-pointed narrative, something of a pattern emerges in that these writers are, in one way or another, fiercely loyal to the notio imperii. They believe that they are of the finest race, entitled to the successes yielded by the rule of law and science and, more often than not, that the empire is God’s instrument to maximize their benign influence on the world. Put differently, while expanding women’s opportunities, they lean heavily on the dominant narratives of their culture: right reason, progress, religion, and...