You can listen to the third episode of Season 2 of of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, "A Brief Journey through Women's Travel Writing in the Summer of 2021", on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, and other podcast apps, available via Buzzsprout.

 

Throughout the month of August, we’ve been sharing Spotlights for our “Around the World with Six Women” Spotlight Series on travel writing. In this month’s episode of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, “A Brief Journey through Women’s Travel Writing in the Summer of 2021,” hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren are joined by the authors of the Spotlight Series, who share what they have learned. By the end of the month, their Spotlights will have taken us vicariously through France, Italy, Germany, India, Chile, Rome, China, the Red Sea, and the Scottish Highlands with six women whose titles appear in our travel genre in the WPHP.

But this month’s episode and the Spotlight series both also touch on the stakes of travel writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in terms of British imperialism and colonial forces, and how considering these stakes can help us contextualize the genre. It prompted us to consider the stakes of our own travel, now that the world is opening up and travel is once again becoming a possibility.

Join us for the third episode of Season 2 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, “A Brief Journey through Women’s Travel Writing in the Summer of 2021” to learn more about women’s involvement in travel writing, its presence in the WPHP, and to hear from WPHP research assistants Angela Wachowich, Hanieh Ghaderi, Isabelle Burrows, Victoria De Hart, Amanda Law, and Julianna Wagar about their experiences reading some of the travel writing in the WPHP and contributing to “Around the World with Six Women: A Spotlight Series on Travel Writing.”

 

Credits:

Produced by: Kate Moffatt, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy

Mixed and mastered by: Alexander Kennard

Music by: Ignatius Sancho, “Sweetest Bard”, A Collection of New Songs (1769) from https://brycchancarey.com/sancho/bard.jpg, and played by Kandice Sharren

 

WPHP Monthly Mercury Episodes Referenced

Season 1, Episode 8: “50 Words for Walking”

Season 1, Episode 7: “1816 and 2020: The Years Without Summers”

 

WPHP Records Referenced

Austen, Jane (person, author)

Pride and Prejudice (title)

Montagu, Mary Wortley (person, author)

Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M---y W----y M------e (title)

Radcliffe, Ann (person, author)

A journey made in the summer of 1794 (title)

Mysteries of Udolpho (title)

Von Minutoli, Wolfradine-Auguste-Luise (person, author)

Wilson, Lucy Sarah Atkins (person, author)

Dixon, Susannah Dorothy (person, author)

Bray, Anna Eliza (person, author and editor)

Fruits of Enterprize Exhibited in the Travels of Belzoni in Egypt and Nubia (title)

Relics of Antiquity, Exhibited in the Ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum (title)

Coleridge, Sara (person, author, translator, editor)

Letters from France (title)

Williams, Helen Maria (person, author)

Letters written in France in the summer 1790, to a friend in England (title)

A Narrative of the Events which have taken place in France; with an account of the present state of society and public opinion (title)

Wollstonecraft, Mary (person, author)

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (person, author)

Piozzi, Hester Lynch Thrale (person, author)

Belzoni, Sarah (person, author)

Fay, Eliza (person, author)

Original Letters from India (title)

Graham, Maria (person, author)

Journal of a residence in Chile in 1822 (title)

Belzoni, Giovanni Battista (person, author)

Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs, and Excavations, in Egypt and Nubia (title)

Kemble, Fanny (person, author)

Roberts, Emma (person, author)

Views in India, China, and on the Shores of the Red Sea (title)

Oriental Scenes, Dramatic Sketches and Tales, with Other Poems (title)

Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan (title)

Spence, Elizabeth Isabella (person, author)

Letters from the North Highlands (title)

Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (title)

 

Works Cited

Andrews, Kerri. Wanderers: A History of Women Walking. Reaktion Books, 2020.

Carrington, Damian. "Elite minority of frequent flyers 'cause most of aviation's climate damage.'" The Guardian, 31 March 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/31/elite-minority-frequent-flyers-aviation-climate-damage-flights-environmental.

Colbert, Benjamin. "British Women's Travel Writing, 1780-1840: Bibliographical Reflections." Women's Writing, vol. 24, no. 2, p. 151–59.

Colbert, Benjamin. Women’s Travel Writing, 1780-1840: A Bio-Bibliographical Database. Designer Movable Type Ltd, https://www.british-travel-writing.org/. 

Dutta, Sutapa, ed. British Women Travellers: Empire and Beyond, 1770-1870. Routledge, 2020.

Fagan, Brian. The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists, and Archaeologists. Book Club, 1977.

Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of the Earth. Maspero, 1961.

Jarvis, Robin. Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel. Palgrave MacMillan, 1997.

Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1988

Kinsley, Zoë. Women Writing the Home Tour, 1682-1812. Ashgate, 2008.

O'Loughlin, Katrina. Women, Writing, and Travel in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge UP, 2018.

Ritchie, Hannah. "Climate change and flying: what share of global CO2 emissions come from aviation?" Our World in Data, 22 October 2020, https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-aviation.

Schlick, Yaël Rachel. Feminism and the Politics of Travel after the Enlightenment. Bucknell UP, 2012.

Turner, Katherine. British Travel Writers in Europe, 1750-1800: Authorship, Gender, and National Identity. Routledge, 2018.

Wallace, Anne. Walking, Literature, and English Culture: The Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century. Clarendon Press, 1993. 

Woolf, Virginia. "Dr. Burney's Evening Party." Life and Letters. Statesmen Publishing Co., 1929.

 

Further Reading

Colbert, Benjamin and Lucy Morrison. Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814-1900. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

D’Ezio, Marianna, “The Advantages of ‘Demi-Naturalization’: Mutual Perceptions of Britain and Italy in Hester Lynch Piozzi's Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy and Germany: The Advantages of ‘Demi-Naturalization.’” Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies, vol. 33, issue 2, June 2010, pp. 165–180. 

O’Loughlin, Katrina Éadaoin, and Gamer, Michael. Women’s Travel Writings in India 1777-1854. Routledge, 2020.

Thompson, Carl. “Journeys to Authority: Reassessing Women's Early Travel Writing, 1763-1862.” Women's Writing, vol. 24, no. 2, Routledge, 2017, pp. 131–50

 

This podcast draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.