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Focusing on prominent accounts by 10 distinguished women writers, who travelled to the Ottoman Empire (in particular, to modern-day Turkey, Egypt, and Cyprus) during the reign of Queen Victoria, this volume analyzes the multi-faceted, often ambivalent and conflicting ways their encounters with Otherness articulated itself to the masses. Especially in Victorian times, a fair number of women perceived travelling as a liberating experience, enabling them to emancipate themselves by abandoning many of the spatial and social conventions enforced in their mother country. Consequently, travel literature often turned into an effective tool to acquire self-awareness, while achieving both personal and literary voices. It also provided an extraordinary opportunity to delve into supposedly unfeminine issues, namely religion, financial affairs, and complicated matters of international politics. The encounter with the Oriental Other also offered women writers the possibility to reflect on their own condition, considering the disturbingly similar state of segregation, commodification, and cultural starvation shared by odalisques, concubines, and the Victorian angel in the house. Yet, the majority of the time, British women travelers could not refrain from adopting an Orientalist gaze while relying on widespread misconceptions and stereotypes since they were not just colonized by gender. There were also racial colonizers.
Elisabetta Marino is an associate professor of English literature at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata.” She is the author of four monographs. She has translated poems by Maria Mazziotti Gillan. She has edited/co-edited 10 collections of essays. She has published extensively on travel literature, Italian American literature, Asian American and Asian British literature, and the English Romantic writers.
Chapter I – Introduction: Women Travellers in the Ottoman Empire; Chapter II – Julia Pardoe; Chapter III – Sophia Lane Poole; Chapter IV – Harriet Martineau; Chapter V – Emilia Bithynia Hornby; Chapter VI – Emmeline Lott; Chapter VII – Lucie Duff Gordon; Chapter VIII – Annie Jane Harvey; Chapter IX – E.C.C. Baillie; Chapter X – Lady Annie Brassey; Chapter XI – Frances Minto Elliot; Conclusions.