Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Traditions

Looking at travel writing by British women from the seventeenth century on, Lawrence explores not only the significance of gender for travel writing, but also the value of travel itself in testing the limits of women’s social freedoms and restraints. She shows how writings by Margaret Cavendish, Frances Burney, Virginia Woolf, and others reconceive the meanings of femininity in relation to such apparent oppositions as travel/home, other/self, and foreign/domestic.