Women Travelers in Egypt: From the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Century ed. by Deborah Manley (review)

Most scholars are familiar with the nineteenth-century musings of women travel writers Harriet Martineau, Amelia Edwards, and especially Mary Kingsley. For the better part of two decades, poststructural, postcolonial, and literary scholars have made increasingly clear the divergently gendered meanings of those European women who practiced the female gaze in colonial environments. Deborah Manley’s Women Travelers in Egypt adds material fodder to ongoing scholarly discussions of gender, representation, and colonial discourse. While there is little engagement here with critical theory, Manley has organized, cut, cropped, and arranged a series of excerpts from writings by women travelers to Egypt spanning more than two centuries. Although the voices are predominately British, and overwhelmingly from the nineteenth century, the scope of the collection, from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, draws from over 40 previously published travel accounts. For this alone, the book is to be recommended.

The structure of the collection reflects Manley’s deep commitment to engaging travel literature as a genre; chapters are organized geographically, rather than chronologically. What results is a series of spatialized vignettes, beginning in Alexandria (chapter 1), moving to Cairo and its environs (chapters 2 and 3), extending up and down the Nile (chapters 4, 5, and 6), exploring Luxor (chapter 7), and ending in the desert (chapter 8). At times, such a structure provides a cultural penetration that might not result from a more traditional chronological ordering of sources. In this way, for example, we can better place in the historical conversation British novelist Mathilda Bethune-Edwards’s 1876 description of a harrowing carriage ride in Cairo (42) with Bettina Selby’s near-death experience while bicycling through the same Cairo streets in 1988 (43).

Manley’s periodization reiterates a well-known yet intriguing transition from eighteenth-century Europeans who traveled to Egypt as “explorers,” to their twentieth-century counterparts who went as “tourists.” That said, Eliza Fay’s 1779 Original Letters from India stand as the sole eighteenth-century text, and Rosemary Mahoney’s 2007 Down the Nile Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff is the sole representative of the twenty-first century experience. While this calls into question the representativeness of Manley’s chosen sources, it underscores that the book is primarily a collection of women’s travel accounts written during the period of “high” imperialism, from the mid nineteenth century to the early twentieth century.

The strength of the collection lies in its ability to focus on key moments of cultural negotiation, for example, between European women and Egyptian crews who led expeditions or tours, or between European women and Egyptian women. A series of excerpts from the accounts of women journeying through the cataracts—sections of dangerous rocky rapids—en route to Nubia (chapter 5) are illustrative of such interactions. With the assistance of the reis of the cataract and his men, woman traveler and writer Harriet Martineau reflected on how “a boy would come riding down a slope of roaring water as confidently as I would ride down a sand-hill on my ass” (111). More reflexively, Martineau spoke of “the perception of savage faculty,” which “contrasted strangely with the images of the bookworm and the professional man at home, who can scarcely use their own limbs or senses, or conceive of any control over external realities” (111). Such musings illustrate the power of travel writing to connect places, peoples, and ideas. It is at such moments that readers, provided with very little subtext or analysis, are left to form their own conclusions as to the way in which such encounters reified Orientalism or critiqued sturdy British masculinity.

Although Manley provides an index that includes both brief biographical details of each travel writer encountered in the text and a short bibliography, the two and a half page introduction is at best underdeveloped. What appears at first glance as a series of travel vignettes...