Spanish Women Travelers at Home and Abroad, 1850-1920: From Tierra del Fuego to the Land of the Midnight Sun by Jennifer Jenkins Wood (review)

Jennifer Jenkins Wood’s book on female Spanish travel writers delivers fascinating and accessible windows on the lives, experiences and ethos of eleven figures who ventured beyond Spain and Europe from 1850 and into the twentieth century. The study not only offers unaccustomed perspectives on canonical writers like Cecilia Böhl de Faber, Carolina Coronado, Emilia Pardo Bazán and Carmen de Burgos but also encompasses lesser-known authors. The inclusion of two princesses, a baroness and a Concepcionist sister adds breadth and interest to this thoroughly satisfying read. One of the volume’s great strengths is Jenkins Wood’s decision to offer lengthy excerpts from the travel accounts in English translation, thus opening up the terrain of female Spanish travel writing to a wider public. Each chapter follows a similar format: biographical details are effectively interwoven with contextual matters to lead into probing analyses of selected pieces. The result is a flowing, elegant and theoretically polished contribution to not only Hispanic scholarship but also female travel writing and gender studies.

Two excellent chapters frame the study. The first introduces the history of Spanish female travelers and the writers’ sociohistorical contexts, outlining the obstacles that impeded women’s access to an equal education and employment and travel opportunities. The second offers an overview of the gendered principles at stake in travel writing, drawing on contemporary feminist theories to complicate women’s access to and perception of travel, and their discursive strategies for authorizing the knowledge acquired through travel.

The lens through which Jenkins Wood approaches Cecilia Böhl de Faber (Fernán Caballero) is travel as therapy for emotional challenges. The focus is on the four articles in epistolary form that arose from the writer’s tour to London and various European countries in the second half of 1836, following her second spouse’s demise. These, Jenkins Wood argues, manifest a keen awareness of Romantic tropes, especially those allied with the feminine such as emotion, and the presentation of a “feminine gaze” through recourse to the picturesque (49).

Carolina Coronado’s travels to Seville and Cádiz (1847-48) to recover from a broken heart inspired poems modelled on the Romantic poetic travel book that reveal elements of the masculine-coded sublime. However, it is her commissioned articles on her 1851 travels through France, England, Belgium and Germany that constitute the core of this chapter. Jenkins Wood argues that Coronado uses the letter to mold a flexible narrative persona that intersperses more feminine descriptions with feminist and political statements and an impassioned defense of Spanish culture.

Acclaimed as a writer of fiction, Emilia Pardo Bazán was also a prolific travel writer on Spain and Europe. Identifying as a cultured traveler rather than an indiscriminate tourist, Pardo Bazán crafted in situ impressionistic, accessible accounts that usually first saw the light as newspaper articles before appearing as books. Of these, Jenkins Wood addresses six published between 1888 and 1902. The Paris World Expositions of 1889 and 1900 figure in two, highlighting Pardo Bazán’s concern, as a member of the 1898 “Generation,” with Spain’s backwardness and its need to Europeanize. Another volume, Por la Europa católica, posits Catholic Belgium as a model for Spain’s regeneration, while others exhibit her search for a Spanish essence rooted in natural beauty and traditions.

Although Pardo Bazán and Rosario de Acuña were almost exact contemporaries, Acuña’s freethinking beliefs resulted in her exclusion from mainstream cultural histories. Jenkins Wood’s study draws welcome attention to this significant intellectual, whose adventurous travels through remote regions of Spain are captured in many pieces. Concentrating on just two, Acuña’s 1875 “Correspondencia de Andalucía” and her Dedication to her 1891 play, El Padre Juan, Jenkins Wood examines her deployment of the picturesque and sublime to negotiate a position...