Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784–1814 by Ingrid Horrocks (review)

It is perhaps an exaggeration to say that travel literature has had field-changing ramifications for Romantic studies, but in the last two decades it has certainly turned our discipline’s understanding of rambling as a Wordsworthian preoccupation to mobility as a larger response to unstable borders. Travel literature and our understanding of its central concerns has, to literalize the concept of itinerary, connected the dots between occurrences at home and events abroad, between globalized others and othering in the center, and finally, between individualism and dispossession. Arguably, no figure better captures such frictions than the woman traveler. She has historically been a figure for both sociability and exclusion, and with the increased ability in the late eighteenth-century to travel abroad affordably and with less distress, individuals previously excluded from the grand tour or otherwise unable to travel could begin to do so. The scholarly literature on travel writing generally, and women’s travel writing particularly, is growing in ways that extend beyond an earlier focus on the liberation women were able to find in travel itself, and the concurrent expressiveness authorized by the experiential medium of travel, and Ingrid Horrocks’s Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784–1814 is rigorously in pursuit of such recent trends as well as the work on backlash anxieties and tensions.

Horrocks brilliantly constructs a model for examining women’s travel writing in the more restrictive domain of mobility, one that contains both the yearning for a larger expressive canvas and the gendered anxieties and their displacements that such yearning provokes. Her themes are wandering narratives that match wandering journeys, the disorientations of lostness and homelessness, and the ways that these articulate both the liberatory and the punitive aspects of being at large in the world. These are all themes recurrently structured into women’s travel writing from the earliest examples of such texts, but Horrocks believes that they are particularly resonant in Romantic women’s writing that worries the existential boundaries of a self that is not at home. Beginning with the premise that “the movements of women wanderers at the center of these works unsettle models such as Adam Smith’s of a society bound by sympathy” (9), Horrocks argues that the female wanderer reveals a different web of sympathies and failure of sympathy, one defined by larger cultural antipathies and dislocations. Narrative digressions are structured into narratives of wandering so that form and content perform a Mobius strip of introspective and extranational or disoriented journeying. This is particularly true during wartime, and the texts examined in Women Wanderers, all from the period between 1784 and 1814, are framed by wartime: Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets and The Emigrants, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence, and Francis Burney’s The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties. Horrocks’s thesis, that wandering female protagonists reveal just how unsafe sympathy is—thus making the depiction of the abject figure much more difficult to process—is a problematic that these works both analyze and perturb: “Once sympathy is no longer rendered safe by being understood as an interaction based on social inequality—of which gender is one of the clearest markers—it becomes exponentially more difficult to regulate and manage” (9).

The current interest in Wollstonecraft’s travel book, A Short Residence, and the need for more critical interest in Burney’s last, and very Romantic novel, The Wanderer, to say nothing of Smith’s The Emigrants, would alone make Horrocks’s Women Wanderers an important contribution to recent work in Romantic studies. While Chapter One provides an overview of how narratives of wandering and travel were explicitly gendered in the literary tradition through the standard list of male writers—Thomson, Goldsmith, Cowper—in conversation with Charlotte Smith’s The Emigrants, the individual chapters on women writers—especially those on Radcliffe and Wollstonecraft—are particularly satisfying. Radcliffe’s gothics ramble, their narratives curiously interposed...