Carmen Andraş

“Gheorghe Şincai” Institute, Târgu Mureş, Romania

carmen_andras@yahoo.com

 

 

Imagining Niagara: Victorian British Lady Travellers in North America[1]

 

 

Abstract: This paper reflects my interest in nineteenth-century British travel literature, several of my previous studies being dedicated to examining accounts of such journeys to the restricted space of Central and Eastern Europe, Romania included. I have decided to extend the geography of my research having in mind the great mobility and dynamism that characterized British travel and exploration in a century that brought about not only the imperial expansion but also the enlargement of knowledge, be it imperial or not, related to power or not. There is an extraordinarily rich and complex corpus of nineteenth-century British travel literature and I have decided to start my research restricting not only the geography of travel but mostly the social and gender category of the travellers: Victorian ladies’ descriptions of distant landscapes, particularly Niagara Falls. The tenacious character, intellectual posture and artistic skills of the British lady travellers, tourists, and explorers at the same time, are quite impressive. So is the quality of postcolonial and feminist critical works dedicated to the subject, especially those by Shirley Foster, Sara Mills, Amanda Gilroy, Dorothy Middleton, Mary Baine Campbell, Dea Birkett, Marion Tinling and so on. My paper represents an initial step in this endeavour. British lady travellers, such as Harriet Martineau, Isabella Bird, Marianne North, Emily Pfeiffer and Frances Trollope, Frances Wright, Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley etc dared to cross not only their frustrating feminine condition in Victorian England from which they tried hard to escape by travelling abroad (helped by their social status too, indeed), but also the boundaries between disciplines set by the Enlightened reason.

Keywords: British voyage literature; Victorian period; lady travellers and writers; Niagara Falls.

 

Women travellers’ accounts, Victorian ladies in particular, represent an increasingly important field of research in the academic circles, where particular attention is paid to the articulations of travel, gender, and representation. (Blunt, 1995; Fawley, 1994; Lawrence, 1994; Melman, 1992; Mills 1991; Birkett, 2004; Foster, 1990; Middleton, 1965; Tinling, 2000) Academic researchers consider it important to record the “physicality of representation itself”. This involves attending to “the multiple sites at which travel writing takes place and hence to the spatiality of representation”. (Duncan, 1999, 2)

Unfortunately, travel archive is “fractured”. “Too often, we think”, confesses James Duncan, that “journals, letters and published writings are assigned to literary scholars and historians; sketches, watercolours and paintings to art historians; and photographs and postcards to historians of photography. We suggest that the alternative strategy of attending to the physicality of representation imposes the obligation to read these different media together and, in so doing, to attend to their different valences and silences”. (Ibidem)

In James Duncan’s opinion, there is yet another sense in which we accentuate the spatiality of representation: “travel writing as an act of translation that constantly works to produce a tense ‘space in-between'”. (Ibidem; see Steven Totosy for the concept of “in-between peripherality”, which can be successfully applied to travel literature and translation) Considered literally, “translation” means to travel from one place to another and implies an obvious dialectic between the “recognition” and “recuperation” of difference. (Ibidem; see also Miller, 1996) “Memory”, individual, but mostly collective or social memory, is also a hypostasis of translation “marked by a boundary crossing and by a realignment of what has become different”. (Ibidem; see also Iser, 1996, 297; Motzkin, 1996, 265-81) Consequently, in representing other peoples, cultures and other landscapes, authors of travel accounts “translate” one space into another, “through a language-game going to and fro from their own cultural reference to the foreign one”. (Ibidem; see also Dingwaney, 1995, 5; Asad and Dixon, 1973; 1985) Just as in literary transpositions from one language into another, “translations from one culture into a referential one are approximate. They take place in an intermediary space where both cultures meet, define or reject, understand or reprehend, combine or clash, annex or censure, include or exclude, compare or classify each other”, “a space in-between”. “This space of translation is not a neutral surface and it is never innocent: it is shot through with relations of power and of desire”. (Duncan, 2) Translation is either a “domesticating method, an ethnographic reduction of the foreign text to target language cultural values, bringing the author back home” or a “foreignizing method, an ethnographic pressure on those values to register the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad”. (Venuti, 1993, 210) Travel literature is often domesticating or taming the unknown and intrinsically the dangerous in” a knowledge-power play”. Nonetheless, in its most fragrant imperial position, through its imaginative or authentic occupation of that “space in-between” -“the space of transculturation” (Pratt, 1992) -travel literature can also “reveal ambivalence and hibridity, a sense of questioning its own objectivity, expertise and theses”. (Duncan, 3-4)

Even though post-colonial theories speak about “travelling cultures” (Clifford, 1992; 1997; see Duncan) and “travelling theory” (Behdad, 1994; Grewal and Kaplan, 1994; Kaplan, 1996; Robertson et al., 1994; Rojek and Urry, 1997; see Duncan), travel is still widely identified with the fascination of picturesque, exotic, different, multi-coloured cultures. Additionally, travel to the past colonies is still described in a nineteenth-century romantic manner categorized by Said (1979; 1993) as “Orientalist”, and by Fabian (1983) as “a form of time-space substitution”.

It is all true in what British lady travellers concern. They dared to cross not only their frustrating feminine condition in Victorian England from which they tried hard to escape by travelling abroad (helped by their social status too, indeed), but also the boundaries between disciplines set by the Enlightened reason. They crossed the frontier between wonder and science, fiction and poetry, creating an imaginative geography; between aesthetics and ethics, creating a geography of pure beauty and human care; between medicine and aesthetics, within a geography of bodily and spiritual reinvigoration; between botany and aesthetics, within a geography of exotic flora; between sociology, politics and ethics, within a human geography of understanding and tolerance, refraining as much as possible feelings of imperial superiority and power.

They were wealthy, but had difficult family responsibilities (they had to look after bed-ridden parents). The few of them who were married had to carry the burden of their unhappiness even though they accompanied their husbands in their missions abroad. Almost all of them were the daughters of very influential fathers who travelled extensively and brought home the “facts” collected during their voyages around the world. Fathers were very authoritarian and did not always encourage their daughters to take part in their experiences. Nevertheless, the young ladies grew more and more interested in what existed far beyond their confined universe. More than this, they created a parallel universe for themselves, a realm of poetry, art, gardening and scientific study, where they escaped from the dullness of their lives.

As Dorothy Middleton notices, it is important to “describe the impulses which sent on their travels a surprisingly large number of women” during Queen Victoria’s reign, when “more women than ever before or perhaps since undertook journeys to remote and savage countries; travelling as individuals, and for a variety of reasons, they were mostly middle-aged and often in poor health, their moral and intellectual standards were extremely high and they left behind them a formidable array of travel books. Nearly always they went alone, blazing no trail and setting no fashion, their solitary ventures altogether different in kind from, for instance, the all-woman expeditions to the Himalaya in recent years. Though this outburst of female energy is undoubtedly linked with the increasingly vigorous movement for women’s political and social emancipation, it was neither an imitation nor a development of the male fashion for exploration which was such a feature of Victorian times. Whereas the famous lone travellers among the men were followed up by expeditions of ever greater size and complexity, the women did not inspire such an outcome”. (Dorothy Middleton, 3-4)

“But in the same way that professionally – as writers, educationalists and doctors – they found it hard to gain recognition, so as travellers they often encountered if not outright hostility at least patronising ridicule”, states Shirley Foster (6). “Frances Kemble, continues Shirley Foster, quotes a satirical article in a French review of the 1820’s, picturing the English female traveller of that period”:

“Coal-scuttle poke bonnets, short and scanty skirts, huge splay feet arrayed in indescribable shoes and boots, short waisted, tight-fitting spencers, colours which not only swore at each other but caused all beholders to swear at them, – these were the outward and visible signs of the British fair of that day”. (Frances Anne Kemble, Record of a Girlhood, 1878, I, p. 108, apud Foster, 6.)

I will not insist on much discussed aspects such as the difficulty women explorers experienced in gaining official acceptance by the Royal Geographical Society. “Not until 1892, observes Shirley Foster, were some of the most notable, including Isabella Bird, Kate Marsden and Mary French Sheldon, admitted as Fellows; and this was a concession which the following year a Special General Meeting, endorsing Curzon’s now renowned opinion that the “genus of professional female globetrotters.is one of the horrors of the latter end of the nineteenth century”, rescinded by refusing to allow the election of any more women Fellows. It took another twenty years for this resolution to be overthrown, and only in January 1913 were women officially granted Fellowship privileges, an extremely delayed victory for them”. (Shirley Foster, 6)

For the most part the Victorian lady travellers were not chiefly concerned about reputation. Few were manifest feminist activists, though some of the more eccentric characters such as Harriet Martineau and Anna Jameson incorporated their radical views into their travel writings. However, in taking the task of their foreign travels, these women were, though unconsciously, affirming certain positions related to their place in society and personal gifts – “their right to do what men had done for centuries, their capability to face challenges while still preserving their female integrity, and their claim to be regarded as individuals, choosing and expanding the channels of their lives. All of them, however, shared her excitement about travel, eagerly tasting its novelty and relishing the freedom from the duties and mundane hard work of daily existence which it gave them”. (Shirley Foster, p.7- 8 )

For example, as Marion Tinling states, American travel had different personal reasons: Frances Kemble intended a successful theatre tour before returning to her London career. As it unhappily happened, she married and settled in the United States for a time and spent most of her later years in America. The imprudent Mrs. Trollope came from England to make money for her family. She failed as a businesswoman but her book about her two years in America launched a successful writing career back home.

Isabella Bird, a British clergyman’s daughter, came to recover her health, but all she desired was to escape from England and discover herself. Harriet Martineau was also given the advice to go abroad to recover from the hard work of writing two treatises on political economy. But nothing could keep her from exhausting travel and many hours of recording her observations on every possible subject.

A book of travel is the story of a quest, and also a study of people and landscapes. Travel on the American continent brought about pages about its natural wonders – Niagara Falls, the Tennessee Valley, the Rockies, Yosemite, and California redwoods, generally, about rich plains, tremendous waterfalls, magnificent purple mountains, and blossoming orchards.

Marianne North came to find “tropical foliage”. She visited the New England coast and the distinguished people of Boston and Washington before escaping to California alone to paint giant redwoods. As many European women, she knew a surprising amount botany, and was eager to see what was exceptional in the American landscape.

They were not so well specialized on fauna as on flora, in part because European mythology populated the New World with fabulous creatures. The Scotswoman Janet Schaw expected to see lions, bears, tigers, and wolves in North Carolina. She had not anticipated alligators, which she associated with Revolutionaries. Theresa Longworth [1] , from Ireland, did encounter a bear in the Yosemite Mountains, who seemed to her kind-hearted enough not to attack her, instead frightening her into falling off a cliff into a precipice.

One English humorist, Lady Theodora Guest, warns against certain creatures of the western prairies:

“There are, it seems, four venomous beasts on these prairies – first, the Tarantula, the enormous spider, ten inches across, on high legs, like a crab; and if he chooses to bite you, you die. Next, the Millepieds, nine inches or so long, like a centipede. If he runs over you, and you pretend to like it, all is well; but if you express the slightest objection to his freedom of action, he curls himself up, like a cantering caterpillar, sticks a few of his thousand feet into you, and – you die. The third is an obnoxious monster, something like a lizard, called, as far as I can remember, a Kilomonster, who behaves in the same sort of way, with the same result; and, finally, the Rattlesnake. This latter reptile does not seem to weight at all on the minds of the Aborigines, as they say if you let them alone they will not attack you, and they do not try to destroy them. A Rattlesnake coils up and throws himself at you, but as he always announces himself by three distinct rattles of his tail, and then can only fling himself his own length, and quite straight, it is supposed to be easy to avoid him. I am sure, though, if I had successfully avoided one, I should go straight home. His bite is not death, if you can get enough raw whisky and swallow it neat, right away” (A Round Trip in North America). Anna Jameson became acquainted with Great Lakes Indians and was adopted by the Chippewas after an act of daring. (See Marion Tinling, X-XI)

The concept of escape is in Shirley Foster’s view, of particular importance here. It is not only the escape into another space, but also the escape from a tedious life into the realm of literature. Self assertion through travel and writing! “But such desire still smacked too much of self-pleasing and irresponsibility, and so certain strategies were employed to ‘cover’ it, regarding both the journeys and the published accounts. Chief of these is the insistence on ‘proper’ purpose, a way of validating the respectability and usefulness of the activity, especially where this could be related to current notions of womanhood”. (Shirley Foster, 1990, 8 )

Their stories meant sometimes the search for health, with travellers like Isabella Bird (whose spinal disease immobilised her in a wheel-chair when she was at home), Marianne North (who suffered from severe deafness), Harriet Martineau [2] . (who suffered poor health as a child, resulting in an anxious, insecure personality. She began to lose her hearing early and by the age of twenty she was forced to resort to the use of ear trumpets). “There is often a link between physical weakness and geographical mobility, since the physical and psychological results of their journeys were often quite surprising”, observes Shirley Foster. (9-10) They were in fact crossing the boundaries of their weak bodies, social restraints and financial dependence upon their fathers and husbands.

Propagandist or philanthropic purpose is related to the desire for “improvement”, so dear to the Victorians. Postcolonial studies often exaggerate their imperialistic hidden purposes. Their enterprises could also mean both self-perfection through knowledge and experience and the enlightenment of others through communication of this knowledge. This motivation encouraged those women collect everywhere “facts” – sociological (about women, children, family, domestic manners), anthropological (primitive peoples and their customs) botanical, medical, archaeological, economical or, political (interested in American democracy; several had abolitionist views; they unmasked patriarchal mentalities, and the subordination of women and children both in foreign societies and at home). Anna Jameson was an Irish archaeologist, writer and art critic, author of the first systematic study of Christian iconography in English language (friend of Lady Byron, Goethe family, Elisabeth and Robert Browning with whom she travelled and exchanged letters); Marianne North, a botanical explorer and painter. Harriett Martineau gained widespread recognition as a social and political scientist, politician, historian, journalist, public educator and fiction writer; Emily Pfeiffer and Frances Trollope, were writers and self-taught social and political commentators; Frances Wright, was a fervent political activist for the equality of rights and militated against slavery in America (especially on her utopian settlement at Nashoba, helped by Frances Trollope, involved in the project of experimental education of black children); Frances Kemble, an actress, a writer and a political activist, tried almost the same thing on her husband’s plantation in Georgia. Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley (poet, specialist in theology and philosophy); Isabella Bird, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in London(accepted in 1892) and the first woman Fellow of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society in Edinburgh, was a famous Victorian, who richly merited her place in the Dictionary of National Biography. By following up her adventures in remote places with her well-informed books, she ensured a continuing interest in her life and in her experiences. She was a writer an explorer and a very passionate photographer The reaction of the Royal Geographical Society to female globe-trotters shows how difficult it was for women to be taken seriously in such purposes; it also shows “how this more academic or intellectual activity was often considered unfeminine or beyond the female sphere”. (Shirley Foster, 11)

In physical terms the most salient evidence of “spiritual revival and widened horizons is the manner in which frailty or invalidism at home were replaced by extraordinary endurance and strength abroad, especially in wilder or more primitive regions where travel was hardly an obvious means of bodily restoration”. (Shirley Foster, p. 12)

Catherine Symonds’s picture of her sister, Marianne North [3] , a world traveller who sought out plants to collect and paint, provides another instance of female stoutness: “She could apparently sit all day painting in a mangrove swamp, and not catch fever. She could live without food, without sleep, and still come home . . . ready to enjoy to the full the flattering reception which London is always ready to give to anyone who has earned its respect by being interesting in any way”. (Marianne North, 1893. 315-6) “We can all work hard at what we like best”, wrote Marianne North, and when one looks round the North Gallery at Kew, at tier upon tier of her vigorous flower paintings. Quality and quantity, in fact, go hand in hand, the result of nearly twenty years of travelling and painting, in the course of Miss North’s self-imposed task of recording the world’s tropical flora. “Travel was a formative influence”. (Dorothy Middleton, 57-8)

“The transformation from invalidism to vigorous strength, states Shirley Foster, effected by the excitement of travel was often only temporary: once away from the stimulus of foreign novelty, the traveller frequently reverted to her previous state of physical debility… Bird offers the most extreme example of this phenomenon. As an adolescent she underwent an operation to remove a tumour on her spine and suffered from back trouble for the rest of her life, but this never prevented her from undertaking some of the most intrepid female expeditions of the century. The symptoms never actually disappeared – she frequently remarks that her back is so painful she has to dismount and rest, or walk instead – but she never allowed them to hinder her progress. Yet on her return to Britain she reverted to a kind of genteel invalidism; without a satisfying outlet for her energies, she could express her frustration only by capitulating to suffering once more”. (Shirley Foster, 13)

Another characteristic of female travel which, despite some protests, is generally well-known as having positive advantages is the chance for women to organise their own actions. Many preferred to travel without male company or assistance, probably anticipating the kind of frustration suffered by Anna Jameson on her trip to Europe with the family to whom she was governess – her employer is so cautious that she contemptuously dismisses him as “a complete wet blanket”. [4] (Anna Jameson: Letters and Friendships. 38)

Isabella Bird was an enthusiastic camper. Always precise, even in her speech (Marianne North observed that Isabella talked very slowly and methodically, as if “she were reciting from one of her books”), Isabella Bird was not everyone’s favourite. Her feelings were violent, her health unstable and her vigour exceptional. She was eager to register facts and sights, struggling on horseback over the highest mountain passes and in native boats down the farthest rivers of the world, on a handful of rice and raisins, her senses open to all the wonders of nature and her mind in search of improving information and moral lessons. When she said “I do not care for any waterfall but Niagara,” she synthesized her obsession for the sublimities of Nature, which she was to seek in all remote places of the world for thirty years: volcanoes in eruption, hurricanes “howling in one protracted, gigantic scream”, the romantic snows of the Rocky Mountains and the desolate uplands of Asia – such experiences aroused to ecstasy this generous and intellectual Victorian lady with a Clapham Sect background and perpetual ill health.

For most of the women, the experience of travel was not in itself enough. Though there must be many who ventured abroad without leaving any record of their adventures, the voluminous body of nineteenth-century female travel literature suggests a major desire to transpose the adventures in books and to spread their words as much as possible. But it was not an easy task. During the 19th century firm conventions of travel writing were established, powerful textual restrictions which determined the reconstruction of the foreign experience: “women writers were defined according to a canon of ‘female literature’, with its prescriptions of appropriate subject matter and style-topics of romance and home and family life, emphasis on feeling and sentiment, and delicacy and emotionalism of expression. Thus the traveller who employed a masculine voice (and the very act of writing ‘factual’ material symbolised entry into male discourse) ran the risk of being regarded as unwomanly and presumptuous. On the other hand, to speak consciously as a woman was possibly to devalue her own creation, undermining its authority and indicating its inferiority. It is equally clear that many of them were knowingly conforming to current criteria of literary femininity in order to make their works acceptable. While implementing this strategy they could obliquely overthrow the gender-oriented constraints upon them.” (Shirley Foster, 18-19)

Frances Trollope, too, hardly notable for her deference to contemporary opinion, takes up a subversive position of mock-humility about her responses:

“I am very often, when greatly struck by some new spectacle, fearful of expressing what it makes me feel. . . affectation, hyperbole, exaggeration, are accusations that seem perpetually staring me in the face” [5] . (Frances Trollope, A Visit to Italy, II, p. 65; see Foster)

In her earlier Domestic Manners (1832), however, after admitting to her womanish superficiality and inability to reason, she adds, “there are points of national peculiarity of which women may judge as ably as men, – all that constitutes the external of society may fairly be entrusted to US”. (Frances Trollope, Gloucester, 1984, p. 32) All such apologia fails to mask the delight of writing about travel experiences.

The development of British travel literature made Lillias Campbell Davidson’s guide so needed and applicable, with its “suggestions to women of all means and conditions” (Lillias Campbell Davidson, Hints to Lady Travellers at Home and Abroad. 1889, p. 7) and its sensible practical advice. In the 80’s and 90’s women were learning to bicycle and to climb mountains. It was beginning to be possible to travel alone by train, to go on riding or walking holidays. “Nowadays,” declares the foreword to this efficient and wise little book, “when a hundred women travel to one who ventured from the security of her own roof-tree in bygone days, some practical hints upon the wide subject of wanderings abroad may be useful and welcome to those whose experiences are less varied than those of their sisters.” “Necessaries of travel” included a filter, a railway key and a travelling bath, and a tin of Keating’s powder “should never be omitted”.

Many of them travelled to several regions and made interesting cross-references between them: Isabella Bird, never well unless she was abroad, in America, Australia and the Far East; Marianne North, painting and collecting botanical specimens throughout southern Europe, the Americas, Africa and the Far East and lifelong travellers like Frances Trollope, Frances Kemble, Emily Pfeiffer, Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley and Anna Jameson, who visited – and compared -Europe and North America.

I have started my research with the North American geographic area, paying also attention to the comparisons that the ladies used to draw between American and European places. Descriptions of landscapes are in my opinion appropriate examples of transdisciplinarity, genre crossing and gender crossing (they are both scientific accounts and literary transpositions of the emotional ties with nature, ethical and aesthetic judgements, fiction and poetry, discovery of foreign spaces and of the self confronted with new, totally different, environments, feminine travel accounts of places that had been the gentlemen’s territory before: high mountains and impressive water falls). Among all Niagara Falls, the symbol of the American freedom and energy, also concentrated the essence of other geographical areas, like Italy whose symbol was the Vesuvius. My presentation of British representations of Niagara is mostly based on Shirley Foster’s analysis of the subject.

Niagara Falls became in their imagination both a natural monument and a state of mind reminding of the dream of classical perfection in Italy and the desire of mental and physical escape in America. Niagara was intensely lived intellectually and physically as the free expression of desire after a frustrating existence in Victorian England. It was the step over the boundaries of scientific and literary expression, over the boundaries of gender and social status imposed at home.

The representation of natural scenery, Niagara Falls particularly, shows theoretical influences derived from aesthetic theories and literary tradition, which pretended that originality is not only impossible but perhaps undesirable. Burke’s theory of the sublime, taken up by Gothic and Romantic writers in their treatment of landscape, established a convention of “nature writing” which emphasised the magnificent, the dramatic and the visually striking. At the same time, eighteenth-century notions of the pleasingly pictorial quality in the natural environment were still influential. The aesthetic vocabulary of the sublime is often invoked by travellers in the nineteenth century: the sublime moment in a text for the woman traveller is one where the focus is both on the landscape and the emotions which it evokes in the narrator (Sara Mills, 2000). Both terrifying and exhilarating, sublime experience represented one of the most important challenges to the rationalism of Enlightenment thought. “Women writers, notices Amanda Gilroy, challenged the assumptions of aesthetic discourse, especially in their valorisation of the detail”. They revised Burke’s model of the sublime (as well as the categories of the picturesque and the beautiful), they personalized it, and invested their landscape descriptions with an “ethic care”. (Joanna Zylinska, “Sublime Speculations: The Economy of the Gift in Feminist Ethics”)

The experience of open, apparently infinite space offered the woman traveller a rare chance to enjoy pure “being”, as well as a means of self-discovery and self-testing. The backgrounds which made the most dramatic impact in this respect were those of mountains and water, both emblematic of limitlessness and unrestrained power. The sense of new being was felt more urgently in the encounter with water in its more dramatic forms. The most remarkable instance of this is their reaction to Niagara.

“For early and mid-nineteenth-century visitors, Shirley Foster observes, Niagara itself represented the apotheosis of their encounters with “uncivilised” America. Like Vesuvius, it exemplified all the supreme magnificence of untamed nature, mysterious, alluring and challenging, and indeed several of the women who had previously travelled in Italy connect the two sights in this regard. The young Victoria Stuart-Wortley comments that the raging water reminds her of the tumultuous eruption of the volcano which she had seen the previous year”. (Shirley Foster, 93). Niagara Falls were so differently perceived by the lady travellers in comparison to other “domestic” ladies represented in the pictures of the time, clinging to their male partners’ arms, the latter showing the Falls to the frightened female companions. While seen through men’s eyes by the representatives of their genre, whom they despised in fact, encounter with Niagara was both passionately desired and anxiously expected by the independent and adventurous women travellers. Generally speaking, America was not associated with the same fulfilment of romantic aspiration and youthful dreams as was Italy, but the Falls were an exception. Here, their imagination had already been animated by earlier accounts, and expectation could combine with personal desire. Frances Trollope, finally on her way to Niagara after a disappointing two years in the States, declares that it was “the object, which for years, I had languished to look upon” (p. 284), while for Anna Jameson, longing sadly in Toronto, it was “a thing to be imagined, hoped, and anticipated, something to live for”. (Winter Studies, I, p. 82) The accounts of the long awaited moment explode with fervour, and vibrantly rebuild the intensity of excitement.

As Shirley Foster notices, in the relation of the same impatiently expected moment, Frances Kemble, as a most talented actress, deliberately “exploits all the potential drama of the moment. She gives two versions of the event, one in her Journal, published in 1835, and the other in her later Record of a Girlhood (1878)… In the former, she builds up the reader’s suspense by depicting her own”: “My mind was eagerly dwelling on what we were going to see: that sight which [Trelawney] said was the only one in the world which had not disappointed him. I felt absolutely nervous with expectation. . . [when I heard] the voice of the mighty cataract. . . [a] frenzy of impatience seized upon me; I could have set off and run the whole way”. (apud Shirley Foster, 96) Her text “almost stumble over itself with its own fervour, continues Shirley Foster, and she carries us along with her frantic momentum as she describes how, without staying for anyone else, she leapt out of the carriage, rushed through the hotel hall and garden, down a steep and narrow rocky footpath and sprang on to the Table Rock where finally, at the brink of the abyss”, “I saw Niagara – oh God! who can describe that sight?” (Frances Kemble, Journal, II, pp. 285-7, apud Foster, 96) At this point, within a deliberate moment of suspense, the Journal ends. In the Record of a Girlhood, however, allows us to share her visualization, as she follows up her prologue with an extensive and powerful representation of the Falls themselves which suggests all the “passion of her response”. (Foster, 96)

Similarly, Isabella Bird declares: “the sublimity of the Falls far exceeded my expectations. It was so very like what I had expected, and yet so totally different. I sat there watching that sea-green curve against the sky till sunset, and. then the crimson rays just fell upon the column of spray above the Canadian Fall, turning it a most beautiful rose-colour”. (The Englishwoman in America, 1856, pp. 216- 236; see Foster)

“Confrontation with Niagara, Shirley Foster concludes, symbolised a process of self-discovery for many of these women, both bodily and psychically. Though less physically challenging than Vesuvius, the Falls could provide excitement and a sense of risk for the adventurous lady tourist not content with merely viewing them from the safety of the American or Canadian bank. Walking under the rapids themselves, for example, was a thrilling and potentially dangerous undertaking. The more intrepid women… were at once frightened and allured by the expedition”. (Shirley Foster, 96)

For Marianne Finch, at Niagara in the 1850s, going behind the Horseshoe Fall was “unspeakably fearful”. (Marianne Finch, An Englishwoman’s Experience in America, 1969, p. 366) Strongly clinging to the wet rock, she was conscious of a new individuality being drawn out of her – “Half drowned and deafened, I emerged with a deeper feeling of awe than I ever experienced before” (p. 367). Matilde Charlotte Houston, making the same trip a few years earlier, nervously comparing the slippery ledge with the unsteady Table Rock suspended over her head, was also caught up in the “wild magnificence” (Hesperos, I, pp. 126-7) despite her fear.

The feeling of risk was an almost attractive test. For Frances Wright, wet and breathless after her descent down a shaky and slippery ladder in order to get a closer look at the Falls, the sense of accomplishment, as well as the magnificence itself, more than compensated for the physical uneasiness; even the nervousness that the Table Rock might fall on her made her only the more appreciative of how here “the sublime is wrought to the terrible” (p. 127; see Foster).

Anna Jameson’s prophecies of the curative effects of the Falls were self-fulfilling. Initially disappointed with the spectacle, she found that the physical rigours awakened her torpid spirits. Making her first visit to Niagara during Canadian winter, she strode through the ice and snow to the Table Rock, the very effort totally converting her disillusion to fright at the “wild and wonderful magnificence. . . [of] the dark-green waters, hurrying with them over the edge of the precipice enormous blocks of ice”.

“There is something very exciting in this view; one cannot help investing Niagara with feelings of human agony and apprehension; one feels a new sensation, something neither terror, wonder, nor admiration, as one looks at the phenomena which it displays. I have been surprised to see how a visit to the Falls galvanises the most matter-of-fact person into a brief exercise of the imaginative powers”, meditates Isabella Bird before this “terrible majesty”. (The Englishwoman in America, 1856, pp. 216- 236)

The travellers’ re-creation of their experience of Niagara reveals the ambivalence of their response. On the one hand Niagara induces some of the most highly emotional writing in their texts, as in the case of Emily Pfeiffer: “The shock we feel when we see that this Hercules of falling waters has been set to work by an Omphale, and is patiently turning a paper mill before taking its awful plunge, is at first painful; but I at least am an epicure in enjoyment, and refuse to yield the delight that is left, in storming after that which has been taken away”. (Flying Leaves from East and West, 1885, pp. 114-5).

On the other hand, however, Niagara could produce in the observer a fear of uncertainty, and some commentators found it hard to come to terms with its powerful and often distressing influence.

A method of taming the disturbing or indescribable is to employ conventional literary terminology. Thus Niagara is variously described in terms of its “sublimity”, “helpless terror”, “inevitable doom”, “mysterious chasm”, “awful beauty”, “terrible majesty” and “manifold perfections and glories”, “sullen dignity”, “soft thunderous music”, “wonder of nature”, “wild and wonderful magnificence”, “magnificently mysterious”; the Falls themselves are “stupendously magnificent” and “fearfully beautiful” with their “silvery torrents”. (Frances Kemble, 1878; Frances Trollope, p. 286; Bird, p. 223; Stuart-Wortley, I, pp. 22, 20; Houston, Hesperos, I, p. 129; Trollope, p. 286; Frances Wright, p. 126; Finch, p. 367)

The sight of Niagara awakened in all the women suppressed or dormant emotions which, though in a roundabout way or unconsciously, they were driven to utter. In describing the water’s violence, for example – to them symbolic of liberated and unlimited energy – they invoke physical, often sexual, imagery, to express their own desire for personal release. The urge to identify with the scene before them often involved discovery of a new spiritual self. Marianne Finch expresses an almost desperate desire to throw herself down into the turmoil- “anything to know it – to feel its power” (p. 365) – and to become “inseparably united” (p. 368) with it. Her passionate response is imaged in her description of the Whirlpool, its agonized waters trying to “escape from their narrow prison-house” (p. 369) as a tormented creature, a suitable personification of her own desire for freedom.

Encounters with landscapes in America were most unlike anything at home and determined the ladies to invoke the sublimity of nature. Descriptions of the sublime were overdetermined for British women; at one and the same time the sublime combined high status aesthetic discourse (often a kind of Romantic poetic language) together with “feminine” emotional response. Their descriptions of Niagara a provide a good example, .especially since Niagara had already become established by the nineteenth century as a place where extreme responses were common and in some senses socially sanctioned (McGreevy, 1992).

“Characteristically”, Shirley Foster states, Anna Jameson and Frances Kemble most ardently “identify with the natural environment here”. Remembering her solitary meditation at Table Rock in the moonlight, Anna Jameson imagines “those wild, impatient, tumultuous rapids” (Winter Studies, 11, p. 67) as “a terrible creature, a tiger at play, which hypnotises her into a volitionless state yet also arouses in her intensely physical feeling. It is not hard to recognise the personal implications of her response in the context of her recent awareness that her marriage was beyond redemption: the waters, “whirling, boiling, dancing, sparkling along… rejoicing as if escaped from bondage” (11, pp. 52-3), become an image of her own new freedom and energies, now harnessed to a bold venture into the wilds of Canada; Niagara, “girdle(d)” with greenery and ‘breathing perfume’ (11, p. 38), enclosing “that furious embrace of the waters above and the waters below” (I, p. 86), symbolises sexual fulfilment which for her has now been sublimated into physical daring and self-discovery”. (Shirley Foster, 100). Overwhelmed by so much “…beauty and terror, and power and joy”, “.that even while I trembled and admired, I could have burst into a wild laugh, and joined the dancing billows in their glorious, fearful mirth-

Leaping like Bacchanals from rock to rock,

Flinging the frantic Thyrsus wild and high!

I shall never see again, or feel again, aught like it-never! I did not think there was an object in nature, animate or inanimate, that could thus overset me now!” (Anna Jameson: Letters and Friendships, 82)

Niagara is openly associated with physical love that brings about both fear and delight to Frances Kemble, while Emily Pfeiffer imagines a passionate embrace: “The torrent here flings itself full-breasted over the precipice, and as we watch it, descends, a sea of diamonds, into the arms of a rainbow, not now a lunar, but a solar one, a triumphal arch of light and colour”. (Flying Leaves from East and West, 1885, pp. 114-5) and Frances Wright invokes the “coldly kiss” of death. (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, pp. 124-135.)

Finally, Niagara brought the much desired peace of mind and body to the ladies who travelled to see it. The moments of fear and torment elapsed as by miracle, leaving behind a feeling of relief and harmony with God and with themselves.

 

These are only glimpses into the legacy of the 19th century British travel around the world, particularly the lady travellers’ accounts. It is a fascinating and rewarding subject that has been very seriously explored recently. Nevertheless, in my opinion, the critical works and anthologies of texts dedicated to travel and exploration in the 19th century leave out Eastern Europe from the destinations of the women travellers as if interesting writers and scientists like the Victorian Lady Emily Gerard Laszowska, who spent several years in Transylvania and wrote two volumes on the people, folklore and beauties of the province did not exist! Border crossing between Eastern and Western Europe is still a difficult endeavour! Much more difficult than genre and gender crossing!

What really matters in fact is not the geography covered by these pioneer travellers, but the way they made their voices listened to all over the world. For, as Emily Pfeiffer puts it metaphorically, “The lion has for so long been the painter, that he is apt too wholly to ignore the aspect which his favourite subject may take from the point of view of the lioness. If the latter will sometimes tell the truth, and tell, not what she thinks she ought to see, but what she really sees, many an intellectual picture which has hitherto satisfied the sense of mankind, may be found to be somewhat out of focus”. (Emily Pfeiffer, Flying Leaves from East and West)

 

 

REFERENCES

PRIMARY SOURCES

– (1915) Anna: Letters and Friendships (1812-1860) ed. Mrs Steuart Erksine. London.

Baille, Marianne. (1819) First Impressions on a Tour upon the Continent in the Summer of 1818, Through Parts of France, Italy, Switzerland, the Borders of Germany, and a Part of French Flanders. London: John Murray.

Bird, Isabella Lucy. (1879) A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains. London: John Murray. Reprinted, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960.

– (1856) The Englishwoman in America. London: John Murray; reprinted, Milwaukee, 1966.

– (1859) The Aspects of Religion in the United States of America. London: Sampson Low, Son and Co.

– (1875) The Hawaiian Archipelago. Six Month Among the Palm Groves, Coral Reefs and Volcanoes of the Sandwich Islands. London: John Murray.

– (1856) (Anon) An Englishwoman in America. London: John Murray.

– (1899) The Yantze Valley and Beyond. An Account of Journeys in China, Chiefly in the Province of Sze Chuan and Among the Man-Tze of the Somo Territory. London.

– (1911) Unbeaten Tracks in Japan. London.

Bodichon, B.L.S. (1972) An American Diary 1857-8. ed. J.W. Reed, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Bridges, Mrs F. D. (1883) Journal of a Lady’s Travels round the World. London.

Cobbe, Frances Power. “Celibacy v. Marriage”, Fraser’s Magazine, LXV, February, 1862

Finch, Marianne. (1853) An Englishwoman’s Experience in America. London: Richard Bentley; reprinted, New York, 1969.

Fuller, Margaret Ossoli. (1855) Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition, and Duties of Woman. Boston.

Gordon Cummings, Constance Frederica. (1884) Granite Crags. Edinburgh and London: Blackwood.

Grant, A. Mrs. (1808) Memoirs of an American Lady; reprinted, New York, 1846.

Guest, Lady Theodora. (1895) A Round Trip in North America. London: Edward Stanford.

Houston, Mrs Matilda Charlotte .(1850) Hesperos; or, Travels in the West .2 vols. London: John W. Parker.

– (1844) Texas and the Gulf of Mexico, or Yachting in the New World . 2 vols. London: John Murray.

– (1879)Twenty Years in the Wild West; or Life in Connaught. London:John Murray.

Jameson, Anna. (1852) Sketches in Canada and Rambles among the Red Men (Part of her Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, 1838). London: Longman.

Jameson, Mrs Anna Brownell. (1838) Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada 3 vols., London: Saunders and Otley.

– (1834) Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad. 4 vols. London

– (1895) Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake. Ed. Charles Eastlake Smith, 2 vols.London.

– (1915) Anna Jameson: Letters and Frienships (1812-1860). Ed. Mrs Steuart Erksine, London: T. Fisher Unwin.

Kemble, Frances Anne (later Butler). (1835) The Journal of Frances Anne Butler.2 vols. London: John Murray; reprinted, New York: Benjamin Blom, 1970.

– (1847) A Year of Consolation. 2 vols. London: Moxon.

– (1863) Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839. New York: Harper; Reprinted, London: Cape, 1961.

– (1878) Records of a Girlhood. 3vols. London: Bentley.

– (1882) Records of Later Life. 3 vols. London: Bentley.

Kingsley, Mary Henrietta. (1896) “The Ascent of Cameroons Peak and Travels in French Congo”. Journal of Commerce Printing Works, Liverpool.

– (1897) Travels in West Africa. London: Macmillan and Co., Limited.

– (1899) West African Studies. London: Macmillan and Co., Limited.

Longworth, Maria Theresa. (1974) Teresina in America. NewYork: Arno Press, Vol. I.

– (Thérese Yelverton, Viscountess Avonmore). (1875) Teresina in America. London: Richard Bentley.

Martineau, Harriet. (1983) Autobiography. 2 vols. London: Virago.

– (1837) Society in America. London: Saunders and Otley; reprinted, New York: AMS Press, 1966.

– (1838) Retrospect of Western Travel. London: Saunders and Otley, and New York: Harper, 1838.

Murray, Amelia M. (1856) Letters from the United States, Cuba and Canada. New York: Putnam. Reprinted, Negro Universities Press, 1969.

Mytton Maury, Sarah. (1848) An Englishwoman in America. London and Liverpool.

North, Marianne. (1892) Recollections of a Happy Life: Being the Autobiography of Marianne North. Ed. Mrs. John Addington Symonds. London & New York: Macmillan. Vol. I. A shortened version of her recollections, with beautiful colour reproductions of some of her paintings, was published as A Vision of Eden in 1980.

– (1893) Some Further Recollections of A Happy Life Selected from the Journals of Marianne North Chiefly between the years 1859 and 1869; edited by her sister Mrs. J. Addington Symonds. London.

Pfeiffer, Emily [Jane (Davis)]. (1885) Flying Leaves from East and West. London: Field & Tuer; New York: Scribner & Welford.

Schaw, Janet. (1923) Journal of a Lady of Quality: Being the Narrative of a Journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina and Portugal, in the Years 1774 to 1776. Ed. Evangeline Walker Andrews, in collaboration with Charles McLean Andrewa. New Haven: Yale UP.

Sewell, Elisabeth Missing. (1862) Impressions of Rome, Florence, and Turin. London: Longman.

– (1856) Ivors. 2 vols. London.

– (1852) Journal of a Summer Tour from Ostend through Germany, Switzerland, and part of the Tyrol to Genoa. London

– (1891) Extracts from a Private Journal Kept from 1845 to 1891. Edinburgh.

Shelley, Mary. (1844) Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843. 2 vols. London: Moxon.

– (1980-1988) The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. 3 vols. Baltimore and London.

Stuart-Wortley, Emmeline. (1851) Travels in the United states etc. During 1849 and 1850. 3 vols. London.

Trollope, Frances. (1832) Domestic Manners of the Americans. New York: Whittaker, Treacher, & Co.; reprinted, Oxford, Oxford UP, 1984; reprinted, Gloucester, 1984.

– (1985) Paris and the Parisians. (1836) Gloucester: Sutton.

– (1842) A Visit to Italy. 2 vols., London: Bentley.

– (1846) Travels and Travellers: A Series of Sketches. 2 vols. London.

Trotter, Mrs Isabella. (1859) First Impressions of the New World on Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longman & Roberts.

Workman Mrs Frances Bullock & William Hunter Workman. (1895) Algerian Memories. London:T. Fisher Unwin

– (1908) Heights of the Mustagh . London: Archibald Constable and Company Limited.

– (1900) In the Ice World of the Himálaya. London: T. Fisher Unwin.

– (1909) Peaks and Glaciers of Nun Kun. London: Constable & Co.

– (1897) Sketches Awheel in Fin de Siecle Iberia. London: T. Fisher Unwin.

– (1910) The Call of the Snowy Hispar. London: Constable and Company Limited.

– (1904) Through Town and Jungle. London: T. Fisher Unwin

Wright, Frances. (1821) 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: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown; reprinted Views of Society and Manners in America. Editor Paul R. Baker. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1963.

 

SECONDARY SOURCES

Asad, T. and J. Dixon. (1985) ‘Translating Europe’s others’. F. Barker et al. eds. Europe and its Others. Colchester: University of Sussex,. 170-93.

Baine Campbell. Mary (1999). Wonder and Science. Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP,

Bates, Robert H. (2000) Mystery, Beauty, and Danger. The Literaturre of the Mountains and Mountain Climbing Published in English Before 1946. Portsmounthe, New Hampshire: Peter E. Randall Publisher.

Behdad, Ali. Belated Travellers: Orientalism in the age of colonial dissolution. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994.

Birkett, Dea. (2004) Spinters abroad. Victorian Lady Explorers. Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire UK: Sutton Publishing. First edition Basil Blackwell, 1989..

Blunt, Alison. Travel, Gender and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa. New York: Guilford Press, 1995.

Burke, Edmund. (1967) A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Oxford: Blackwell.

Clifford, J. (1992) ‘Travelling cultures’, in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. Treichler (eds),Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, pp. 96-116.

– (1997) Routes: Travel and translation in the late twentieth century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Davidson, Lillias Campbell. (1889) Hints to Lady Travellers at Home and Abroad. London.

Dingwaney, A. (1995) ‘Introduction: translating “third world” cultures’, in A. Dingwaney and C. Maier (eds), Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and cross-cultural texts, Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, pp. 3-15.

Duncan, James and Gregory, Derek eds. (1999) Writes of Passage: Travel Writing, Place and Ambiguity. London: Routledge.

Fabian, J. (1983) Time and the Other. New York: Columbia University Press.

Fawley, M. (1994) A Wider Range: Travel writing by women in Victorian England, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ferguson F. (1992) Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the aesthetics of individuation. Routledge: London.

Foster, Shirley. (1990) Across New Worlds. Nineteenth-Century Women Travellers and their Writings. Harvester: Wheatsheaf.

Foster, Shirley and Sara Mills (Editors). (2002) An Anthology of Women’s Travel Writing. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP.

Gilroy, Amanda. (Editor) Romantic Geographies. Discourses of Travel 1775-1844. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP.

Gregory, Derek. (1995) ‘Between the book and the lamp: imaginative geographies of Egypt, 1849-50’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20, pp. 29-57.

– (1998) ‘Power, knowledge and geography’, Geographische Zeitschrift 86.

Grewal, I. and Kaplan, C. (eds) (1994) Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and transnational feminist practice, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Iser, W. (1996) ‘Coda to the discussion’, in S. Budick and W. Iser (eds), The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the space between, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, pp. 95- 302.

Kaplan, C. (1996) Questions of Travel: Postmodern discourses of displacement, London: Duke.

Lawrence, Karen (1994) Penelope Voyages: Women and travel in the British literary tradition, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

McGreevy P. (1992) “Reading the texts of Niagara Falls: the metaphor of death,” pp.50-72, in Barnes T and Duncan J eds. Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape, Routledge: London.

Melman, Billie. (1992) Women’s Orients: English women and the Middle East, 1718-1918, London: Macmillan.

Middleton, Dorothy. (1965) Victorian Lady Travellers, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Miller, David and Reill, Peter (eds) (1996) Visions of Empire: Voyages, botany and representations of nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Miller, J.H. (1996) ‘Border crossings, translating theory: Ruth’, in S. Budick and W. Iser (eds), The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the space between. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, pp. 207-23.

Mills, Sara (1991) Discourses of Difference: An analysis of women’s travel writing and Colonialism. London and New York: Routledge.

– (2000) “Written on the Landscape: Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark”. Gilroy Amanda. (Editor) Romantic Geographies. Discourses of Travel 1775-1844. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, pp. 19-35.

Motzkin, G. (1996) ‘Memory and cultural translation’, in S. Budick and W. Iser (eds), The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the space between. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, pp. 265-81.

Morris, Mary & Larry O’Connor. (1996) The Virago Book of Women Travellers. London: Virago.

Ousby, Ian (1990) The Englishman’s England: Travel, taste and the rise of tourism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Porter, Dennis (1991) Haunted Journeys: Desire and transgression in European travel writing, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Pratt, Mary Louise (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel writing and transculturation, London and New York: Routledge.

Robertson, G. et al. (1994) Travellers’ Tales: Narratives of home and displacement, London: Routledge.

Rojek, C. and Urry, J. (eds) (1997) Touring Cultures: Transformations of travel and theory, London: Routledge.

Rose, Gillian. (1993) Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge: Politiy Press, and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Said, E. (1979) Orientalism, New York: Vintage.

– (1993) Culture and Imperialism, New York: Knopf.

Spurr, David (1993) The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial discourse in journalism, travel writing and imperial administration, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Stafford, Barbara (1984) Voyage into Substance: Art, science, nature and the illustrated travel account 1760-1840, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Tinling, Marion (Editor). With Women’s Eyes. Visitors to the New World, 1775-1918. Archon Books.

Totosy de Zepetnek, Steven. “Comparative Cultural Studies and the Study of Central European Culture”. Comparative Central European Culture. Ed. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek. West Lafayette. Indiana: Purdue UP, 2002. 1-32.

Venuti, L. (1993) ‘Translation as cultural politics: regimes of domestication in English’, Textual Practice 7.2, pp. 208-23.

Wright, Eamon. (2005) British Women Writers and Race, 1788-1818. Narrations of Modernity. London: Palgrave.

Zylinska, Joanna. “Sublime Speculations: The Economy of the Gift in Feminist Ethics”. in Journal of social and political thought. j_spot online edition ISSN 1481 8 5842

Yaeger, P. (1989) “Toward a female sublime”. Kauffman L. ed Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism, Blackwell: Oxford, pp 191-212.

 

 

Notes

[1] Maria Theresa Longworth (1832?-1881) was a controversial figure in Great Britain. Because she was a Catholic and Major William Yelverton, whom she married in 1857, was a protestant, the marriage was declared illegal. Despite the fact that he had deserted her and married another woman, Theresa spent many years in litigation to establish her conjugal rights and continued to uphold her right to her husband’s name. After the major’s father died in 1870, he had the right of succession to the title of Viscount Avonmore, and she assumed the title of Viscountess Avonmore. Her visit to America took place in the early 1870s. She was educated in a French convent, and after the Crimean war she joined the French Sisters of Mercy in nursing the sick at the hospital of Galata. Major Yelverton had served with the Royal Army in Crimea.

[2] Harriet Martineau was born into a bourgeois Unitarian family of Huguenot descent in Norwich on 12 June 1802, the sixth of eight children. The family’s French heritage and bilingualism, Unitarianism, and Enlightenment values shaped the development of the Martineau children and their adult lives. Harriet suffered poor health as a child, resulting in an anxious, insecure personality. She began to lose her hearing early and by the age of twenty she was forced to resort to the use of ear trumpets. These factors resulted in a sense of isolation, unworthiness, and unhappiness. She sought refuge from the troubles of the world in books and study, and perhaps to a greater degree than her siblings immersed herself in the study of languages, classics, mathematics, music, literature, biography, history and religion. Quite early she had developed a passion to write. H. Martineau was particularly influenced by the writings of Shakespeare, Bunyan, Milton, and later Bacon, Condorcet, Montesquieu, Hegel, Lessing, Adam Smith, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Wordsworth, Anna Barbauld and Hannah More, David Hartley, Dugald Stewart, Thomas Malthus, Joseph Priestley, and Saint-Simon. She read avidly the fiction of Austen, Goethe, Wordsworth and others. In the Unitarian schools she studied logic, rhetoric, poetry, Latin, Greek and Italian and enjoyed translating Tacitus and Petrarch, and German and French authors. In brief, she was well educated in schools, by her siblings and tutors, and by herself.

H. Martineau loved to write and, in addition to some small books on the subject of religious devotion, she published in the Unitarian Monthly Repository during the 1820s over 100 articles, essays, stories and poems on religion, literature, philosophy, political economy, social issues (slavery, education, women’s condition), natural rights, science, and the works of Socrates, Godwin, Lessing, Doddridge, and Crombie. In 1832 she began the Illustrations of Political Economy, twenty-five tales or novelettes, which were meant to illustrate the principles of political economy as derived from a text on the subject by James Mill. The great success of this series established Harriet Martineau as a known and even popular author and made her financially independent. It was the strain of writing this series within a two-year period (1832-4) that precipitated her trip to America.

After a period of illness (1839-44), during which she wrote a number of books, she moved permanently to Ambleside in England’s Lake District, built a home, and pursued her interests through writing, correspondence, civic affairs, teaching at the Mechanics Institute, and entertaining numerous friends from England and America. Her further travels included a seven-month journey throughout the Middle East (1846), a trip to Ireland (1852), and stays in London, especially during the summers. These travels yielded her Eastern Life: Present and Past (1848) and Letters from Ireland (1852). Between these, however, the prodigious H. Martineau began to write articles for Dickens’s Household Words, published A History of the Thirty Years’ Peace (1849-51) and Household Education (1849), as well as an exchange with Henry Atkinson on science, phrenology and mesmerism entitled, Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development (1851). In 1852 she also began to write leaders regularly (1852-66) for the Daily News.

In 1853 she published her translation and condensation of Auguste Comte’s Cours de Philosophie Positive, which became the standard English and later French version of Comte’s foundational work in sociology. She had by now rejected organized religion altogether and was convinced that the positive social sciences were the only efficacious avenue to understanding the world and interpreting life. In the mid-1850s H. Martineau became ill once again and was convinced that she would die. Her preparation for the inevitable included writing her Autobiography, which was printed and stored for release upon her death. However, she lived for another twenty years and the eventual publishing date was 1877! H. Martineau remained socially and politically engaged with such issues as divorce and matrimonial laws, factory legislation protecting women and children, women’s suffrage, and the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s. She continued to write fiction as well as non-fiction, publishing Sketches from Life (1856), considered by Dickens to be too sympathetic toward Catholics. Partly as a result of her correspondence with Florence Nightingale and her support of Nightingale’s work, H. Martineau was fascinated with India, and wrote two books, British Rule in India (1857) and Suggestions Towards the Future Government of India (1858), as well as many articles and leaders on the situation there.

Intrigued by the dynamics of the intersection of biography and history, H. Martineau became an expert author of obituaries (including her own!) and biographical sketches, a selection of which she published as Biographical Sketches in 1869, continuing an active writing career until near the end of her life. In the mid-1870s H. Martineau became weaker and was finally confined to her bedroom. She died on 27 June 1876.

[3] Marianne North (1830-1890) was an English botanical explorer. She travelled extensively in Europe with her father, and after his death in 1869 she ventured alone on the first of numerous trips that would take her to many exotic places in the world. She spent the rest of 1871 and 1872 in Jamaica, and, after a short visit to her London home, she set off for Brazil. This trip was followed by another to Japan in 1875, via the United States. When she reached the Pacific coast she visited the Big Trees and Yosemite. Her careful botanical paintings are now in the North Gallery, which she donated to the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew, England. In the gallery she placed a dado of 246 panels of woods collected from all over the world. She travelled continuously from 1871 until 1882, visiting almost every continent and numerous islands in the pacific and the Atlantic. In 1881, returning from New Zealand, she crossed the United States again, visiting more big trees and Yosemite and, in the East, the lush gardens of Staten Island. In her travels she discovered many new plants, some of which were named for her. A shortened version of her recollections, with beautiful colour reproductions of some of her paintings, was published in collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, as A Vision of Eden: The Life and Work of Marianne North, New York, Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1980. (1871).

[4] Anna Brownell Murphy Jameson (1794-1860) was an Irish archaeologist, a well-known writer and art critic. She came to Canada in the winter of 1838. Her husband, Robert Jameson, from whom she separated shortly after their marriage in 1825, was running for an office in Canada and she wished to support his bid. She spent a bleak winter in Ontario and in early June she travelled to Mackinac and Sault Ste Marie. She was much interested in the Indians and had fallen into best company to give her entrée to the Great Lakes Tribes. She travelled with two daughters of the then-deceased Irish trader John Johnston, from Sault Ste Marie. Johnston’s widow, Charlotte (Anna called her Neengai), was the full-blood daughter of a Chippewa chief. Her two months of travel into the north woods ended when she returned from the Manitoulin Islands with the Indian superintendent. She was the only woman in a party of twenty-two. They travelled by birch-bark canoe, slept out of doors, and cooked over campfires. The journey ended in Penetanguishene, on Georgian Bay. Anna spent the rest of her life in London, with excursions to Italy and Germany. She accompanied Elisabeth and Robert Browning to Italy after their marriage.

[5] Like her son, Anthony, Frances Trollope was a prolific writer of novels. She wrote -thirty-four of them. But unlike her son, Frances did not win acclaim and celebrity for her fiction. Rather it was the travel book Domestic Manners of the Americans that brought her notice. The book, a scathingly funny attack on the manners of the upstart Republicans, of “eternal shaking .hands” and of living in “primeval intimacy with our cow,” has as its center a concern for the role of women in America. Her novels were noted for their triumphant feminine spirit that heralded a new strong kind of heroine, and in Domestic Manners she bemoaned “the lamentable insignificance of the American woman.” When her family suffered financial setbacks, Trollope, at the age of 48, set off for the. United States, and for four years she pursued many business and cultural enterprises for income. Most of the businesses failed, and it was in the face of these failures that she turned to writing. With subsequent travel books and novels, Trollope was never able to recapture the popularity of Domestic Manners. She died at 83 in Florence.