Dear Brian Dolan, Do you really mean 'any way at all'? There are many
fictitious 18th c women who move about from place to place, over sea and
land, but you would not call them travellers in the way that say, Mary
Wollstonecraft is a traveller in Scandinavia; for instance, in Peter
Wilkins (1750), there is a winged woman named Youwarkee who, being winged,
travels through the air far distances from her native land of the Swangean,
and makes perilous journeys (again flying) through a tortuous cave tunnel.
Then there are Moll Flanders and Roxana, both of whom go places by land and
sea. Gothic heroines seldom stay in the same place. Are these all
travellers in your book? Another way of putting it would be, do you mean by
'women travellers' women who happen to travel (because they are fleeing
from a villain, seeking a loved one, visiting an aunt at a fashionable
watering place, begging as vagrants for their living), or do you mean to
restrict your list to women for whom travel itself is the main reason for
their movement, whether purposeful travel (to see the world, have
adventures, discover how to live well, like Pekuah in Rasselas ) or aimless
travel (wandering, rambling)?
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Nora Crook <[log in to unmask]>
Reader in English Studies, Anglia Polytechnic University
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