Early 19th-Century Women’s Travel Books on Europe and America

In the early 19th century, English women began to publish accounts of their travels to America and Europe (and elsewhere).  Not all of those English travel accounts of the new land were flattering.  On the contrary, they reflected a “broader public history of misunderstanding between Britain and the U.S.,” which was fueled by travel writing.  (Homestead, The Transatlantic Village, 10)

For the first time in history, American women, “the majority of them white and middle or upper class,” also began to travel abroad in significant numbers in the 1820s.  (Schriber, Telling Travels, xi)  The writers among them were aware of the English women’s travel books and began to publish their own.

Travel Books by English and American Writers Published Between 1821 and 1842

• English--Wright, Frances.  Views of Society and Manners in America; in a Series of Letters from that Country to a Friend in England During the Years 1818, 1819, and 1820, by an Englishwoman.  London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821;
  
  
• English--Hall, Margaret Hunter.  The Aristocratic Journey: Being the Outspoken Letters of Mrs. Basil Hall Written During a Fourteen Months' Sojourn in America, 1827-1828.  New York: G. P. Putnam's sons, 1931 (who published her account after her husband, Captain Basil Hall, published his in 1929);
  
  
• English--Trollope, Frances.  Domestic Manners of the Americans.  London:  Printed for Whittaker, Treacher & Co., 1832 and Paris and the Parisians in 1835.  New York:  Harper & Brothers, 1836;
  
  
• English--Jameson, Mrs. (Anna Brownell).  Diary of an Ennuyee.  Boston:  Lilly, Wait, Colman, and Holden, 1833 and Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad with Tales and Miscellanies Now First Collected, and a New Edition of the “Diary of an Ennuyee.”  New York:   Harper & Brothers, 1834;
  
  
• American--Willard, Emma.  Journal and Letters from France and Great Britain.  Troy, New York: Tuttle, 1833;
  
  
• English--Kemble, Frances (Fanny) Anne.  Journal of a Residence in America.  Paris:  A. and W. Galignani, 1835;
  
  
• English--Martineau, Harriet.  Society in America.  New York:  Saunders and Otley, 1837 and Retrospect of Western Travel.  London:  Saunders and Otley, 1838;
  
  
• English--Felton, Mrs. John.  Life in America: A Narrative of Two Years' City & Country Residence in the United States.  Hull:  Printed by J. Hutchinson, 1838;
  
  
• American--Hall, Fanny W.  Rambles in Europe; or A Tour Through France, Italy, Switzerland, Great Britain, and Ireland, in 1836.  New York:  E. French, 1839;
  
  
• American--Haight, Sarah Rogers.  Letters from the Old World by A Lady of New-York.  New York:  Harper & Brothers, 1840;
  
  
• American--Sedgwick, Catharine Maria.  Letters From Abroad to Kindred at Home.  New York:  Harper & Brothers, 1841; and
  
  
• American--Sigourney, Mrs. L.H. (Lydia Huntley).  Pleasant Memories of Pleasant Lands.  Boston:  J. Munroe and Co., 1842.
  

A new genre of literature arose out of their travels in the 1820s and 1830s:  the women’s travel book of first-person narratives or travelogues.  “[O]f the 691 American books of travel published between 1800 and 1868, only 35 were the work of women” with 27 of those published before the Civil War in 1861.  (Schriber, Julia Ward Howe and the Travel Book, 269; Schriber, Telling Travels, xxi)  Of those 27, at least 3 books on Europe were published by middle-aged American women who were immortalized in A Woman of the Century:  Emma Willard, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Lydia Sigourney.

As you can see from the foregoing table, in 1833, Emma published her journal and letters documenting her travels at age forty-three through France and Great Britain.  While she was forty-nine and fifty years old, Catharine took a fifteen-month trip through Europe visiting England, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, France, and Italy during 1839 to 1840 with her brother’s family.  In 1842, Lydia published an account of her trip to Europe taken in 1840 when she was forty-nine and fifty years old.  Those early travel writers pioneered a literary genre before shipbuilding advances in the 1840s and 1850s further enabled women to venture abroad.  In America, there was a concomitant growth in the market for travel books with 325 published between 1800 and 1850 and 1,440 published between 1851 and 1900.  

Whether titled as letters, journals, sketches, narratives, notes, studies, or rambles, however, American travel writing in the early 19th century was less intended to entertain than to inform the reader concerning a variety of topics, including national and international issues.  Indeed, “[f]emale travelers … quietly slipped into the available public space of the travel genre in the first half of the nineteenth century; but in the latter part of the century they deliberately carved out ever more territory in which to make themselves heard.”  (Schriber, Telling Travels, xxvi)  Educated and empowered by their travels, women’s travel books “became an important instrument for the emancipation of women.”  (Hamalion, Ladies on the Loose, xii)