Women, Writing, and Travel in the Eighteenth Century by Katrina O'Loughlin (review)

Impressive in its geographical scope—charting British women's journeys to Turkey, Russia, Greece, Italy, Antigua, North Carolina, and Sierra Leone—this valuable contribution to studies in travel writing reanimates crucial voices in eighteenth-century literature and culture. Save the well-known travel accounts of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Turkish Embassy Letters, published posthumously in 1763) and Mary Wollstonecraft (Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden Norway and Denmark, 1796), letters, narratives, and journals of female travelers have been a neglected area of study about the eighteenth century and, indeed, about earlier periods as well. One of the chief values of this book is its push toward rectifying that underrepresentation: it offers both a compelling collection of under-examined travel accounts and a thorough analysis of their collective investments in what O'Loughlin calls forms of sociality, or codes of "language, manner, behaviour, or social organization…[that] render individuals intelligible to, and therefore part of, a social group," whether through sociability (the culture of polite taste), sensibility (the culture of feeling), or some complex combination of the two (22). The stakes in O'Loughlin's argument are twofold: travel writing is itself an essential genre of emergent British subjectivity in the eighteenth century, and women's engagements with the genre and its many constituent practices—physical mobility, writing, reading, conversing, publishing—make evident the role travel plays in shaping women's authority and identity.

The book is organized geographically rather than chronologically, with each of the six chapters focusing on a particular traveler and her respective travel text. The chapters move from Constantinople (with Montagu and Lady Elizabeth Craven), to Crimea and Russia (via Craven, Jane Vigor, and Eliza Justice), and finally the Atlantic World (with Janet Schaw and Anna Maria Falconbridge). There are, of course, thematic threads connecting the travelers, notably inaugurated in the opening chapter on Montagu, which establishes the Turkish bath as a "counterpublic of feminised and cosmopolitan sociability" where polite interaction and elite intellectual curiosity reign, challenging the male gaze of Western European courts and the diminution of agency for Turkish women (53). Montagu's intended audience—a coterie of elite, likely female, readers—shapes her focus on polite sociability as the critical measure of a culture's civility. By contrast, as argued in the book's second chapter, Craven's more public readership and royalist leanings lead her to consider aesthetic feeling—and, indeed, aristocratic superiority—rather than mutual sociability as a driving trope in her representation of Constantinople. Feeling, too, guides Jane Vigor's account of her travels in Russia, where civility, friendship, and emotional exchange function as a vehicle of sociability rather than a counterpoint to it. Like Montagu's Turkish baths, the Anglo-Russian court becomes a space of cultural affinity rather than difference.

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 pick up on the role of sentiment as a form of sociality in travel writing, though to different ends. Eliza Justice's unique account of her time in Russia—Voyage to Russia is the only non-epistolary account examined in the book and the only record written by a non-elite woman—upholds virtue and integrity rather than taste and feeling as barometers of social value. Indeed, this is an especially fascinating chapter, as many of the book's driving questions come to a point of intersection: aristocracy and the middle class, public and private, print and manuscript, gender and access, court and commerce. In an effort to create clear links between Justice and the travelers that precede her (at least in terms of the book's structure), the complex and erudite analysis of A Voyage to Russia seems, though, cut short. The challenge, of course, given O'Loughlin's ambitious task in this book, is that of a balancing act. How might one gather in, anthologize, and subsequently argue for multiple examples of women's travel writing, while at the same time honoring the...