Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784–1814

Ingrid Horrocks

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781107182233
• eBook ISBN: 9781316865361
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the last days of the Scandinavian journey that would become the basis of her great post-Revolutionary travel book, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote, 'I am weary of travelling - yet seem to have no home - no resting place to look to - I am strangely cast off'. From this starting point, Ingrid Horrocks reveals the significance of representations of women wanderers in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, particularly in the work of women writers. She follows gendered, frequently reluctant wanderers beyond travel narratives into poetry, gothic romances, and sentimental novels, and places them within a long history of uses of the more traditional literary figure of the male wanderer. Drawing out the relationship between mobility and affect, and illuminating textual forms of wandering, Horrocks shows how paying attention to the figure of the woman wanderer sheds new light on women and travel, and alters assumptions about mobility's connection with freedom.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Reluctant Wanderers
• Chapter 1 “Circling Eye” to “Houseless Stranger”: The Shifting Landscape in the Long Poem
• Chapter 2 The Desolations of Wandering: Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, 1784–1800
• Chapter 3 “The Irresistible Force of Circumstances”: The Poetics of Wandering in Radcliffean Gothic
• Chapter 4 “Take, O World! Thy Much Indebted Tear!”: Mary Wollstonecraft Travels
• Chapter 5 “No Motive of Choice”: Frances Burney and the Wandering Novel
• Coda: “He Could Afford to Suffer”: Losses and Gains
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index