Travel Writing in The English Woman's Journal (1858-1864): An Area of Leisure in the Context of Women's Work

Victorian women travelled and wrote about their travels in great numbers. While the travel books of some of these women have been critically discussed, research has almost completely ignored the material to be found in Victorian magazines, where women published accounts of their travels and sketched destinations that might be attractive for other ladies' peregrinations. This article focuses one of these magazines, the English Woman's Journal, an important publication of the mid-Victorian women's movement. It discusses this Journal's special take on travel and travel's status as an important yet also precarious leisure activity for bourgeois women, against the backdrop of the magazine's prominent discussion of female work.