Women’s Travel Notes in 19 Century

Travelling: to see new landscapes and places, to know them as well as to enjoy trips and travels: all this is a part of the world of the modern person after 18 century. The interest to know toward the world found its expression in the travelogues. In the early modern time women were more often objects of travel descriptions. In 19 century as travels became more comfortable and less dangerous the number of travelling women increased, especially in Victorian England: Mary Montagu (1689 – 1762), Elisabeth Craven (1750 – 1828), Georgina Mackenzie (1833-1874) and Paulina Irby (1831 – 1911), Emily Strangford (1826 – 1887) and many others. Women’s travels increased parallel to the spread of female education and the women’s movement rights movement. In that time the strict division between public and private and the domestication became more obvious. For women travels became a way to come out of the home, to enter the public sphere. Their travel descriptions were a way to reach more publicity. It was a transgressive way against the gender norms and gender order of the 19^th century, against the restrictions of the intellectual horizon of women although their descriptions remained in the restrains of their class- and racial prejudices against the cultures they described.