WOMEN, WRITING, TRAVEL (C. 1840- C.1940)
Module Leader:
Dr Catherine Wynne
No of Credits:
20
Level:
M/7
Semester available:
Semester 2
Pre-requisites:
none
Concurrent module:
not applicable
Post-requisites:
none
Mandatory constraints:
none
Advisory constraints:
none
Course rationale:
This module examines British female travel narratives from the 1840s to the 1940s, with
particular emphasis on Africa, Egypt and the Middle East. The module enables students
to analyse nineteenth-and twentieth-century travel writing within an imperialist context
and to interrogate questions of race, gender and subjectivity. The module emerges from
my current research. It is designed to generate a pathway towards doctoral research.
Aims and distinctive features:
To broaden students’ engagement with empire through travel writing. To deepen
knowledge of the genre of travel writing. To examine the role of travel writing in the
construction of imperial hegemony. To examine how female travel writers participate in
or provide resistance to imperial dominance. To engage students in detailed literary,
cultural and historical research.
Learning outcomes:
On completion of this module, students should be able to:
 Demonstrate a thorough knowledge of the genre, within an historical, political and
cultural context.
 Deploy close textual analysis.
 Employ a range of key critical and theoretical approaches (postcolonial and feminist)
for analyzing these texts.
 Demonstrate the ability to engage in extensive library and electronically-based
research and to organise this research into a coherent and structured essay.
 Present a 20-minute research paper to the class.
Learning and teaching strategy:
 10 two-hour seminars. These will be led in the main by student presentations.
Students will be required to provide contextual information for the texts under
discussion; deploy current theoretical and critical strategies for an understanding of
issues/texts; explain ways of understanding the texts within their socio-historical and
political contexts.
 Consultation tutorials by appointment. These allow students to discuss any specific
aspect of the module content that is of interest/concern to them.
Arrangements for revision and private study:
The timetable will incorporate a seminar on essay preparation. The Easter vacation will
provide a natural break for essay preparation.
Assessment strategy:
One presentation, 40% (the presentation must also be submitted as a 2000 word written
paper). One extended analytical 3000 word essay, 60%.
Indicative content:
This module examines female travel narratives from the 1840s to the 1940s, with
particular emphasis on Africa, Egypt and the Middle East. A variety of reasons prompted
female travel and exploration in this period, including biographical impulse and improved
technologies of travel. While Lucie Duff Gordon’s seven-year stay in Egypt until her
death was impelled by consumption and a desire to prolong her life, others like Florence
Nightingale and Gertrude Bell, for example, were influenced by a desire to expand the
options available to Victorian women. Nightingale’s travels in Egypt hastened a career in
nursing. Mary Kingsley’s formative experiences of home revolved around the nursing of
an invalid mother. Agatha Christie’s first expedition to Iraq occurred after her divorce.
She developed an interest in archaeology after her second marriage to the archaeologist
Max Mallowan.
The module commences with a discussion of current critical thinking on female
travellers in the Ottoman empire. Much of this material focuses on European women’s
privileged access to the harem and examines how their accounts shape an interpretation
of domesticity that is often in tension with contemporaneous accounts of their male
counterparts. In travel narratives by British women, notions of self and society at home
are shaped by an encounter with Ottoman or Arab domesticity. The module’s
examination of accounts of the harem incorporates perspectives from the Turkish MelekHanum’s Thirty Years in the Harem (1872) and its sequel Six Years in Europe (1873).
British women travellers were not only engaged in recording and examining
domestic space. They were also deeply involved with the cultures and politics of the
countries they encountered. The module considers the contradictions in their engagement
with cultures, including their own. Gertrude Bell, for example, was a vehement antisuffragist who travelled alone with Bedouin tribes and became a British spy in World
War I, and was instrumental in shaping the politics of post-War Iraq.
Although enabled by imperial expansion and operating from within an imperial
discourse the module explores how female British women’s narratives of their travelled
world simultaneously ascribe to and deviate from colonial and racial codes to reveal a
variety of voices that are complex, heterogeneous and dissonant.
Indicative bibliography:
Introduction. Key Readings: Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women in the
Middle East, 1718-1918; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and
Transculturation; Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel
Writing and Colonialism.
Weeks 2-3 Harem:
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters (1763)
Florence Nightingale, Letters from Egypt (1849)
Melek-Hanum, Thirty Years in the Harem: or, the Autobiography of Melek-Hanum, wife
of H. H. Kibrizli-Mehemet-Pasha (1872).
Melek-Hanum, Six Years in Europe: Sequel to Thirty Years in the Harem. The
Autobiographical Notes of Melek-Hanum, wife of H.H. Kibrizli-Mehemet-Pasha, ed. L.
A. Chamerovzow (1873).
4-5 Playing the Game
Gertrude Bell, The Desert and the Sown (1907) and extracts from other works.
Freya Stark, The Southern Gates of Arabia (1936)
6-7 Exploration
Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa (1897)
Anne Blunt, Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates (1879)
8 Archaeology
Extracts from Amelia Edwards, A Thousand Miles Up the Nile (1877) and Pharaohs,
Fellahs and Explorers (1891)
Agatha Christie Mallowan, Come, Tell Me How You Live: An Archaeological Memoir
(1946)
Mary Westmacott [Agatha Christie], Absent in the Spring (1944)
9 Gender
Lucie Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt (1865)
Rosita Forbes, The Secret of the Sahara: Kufara (1921)
10 The module will also incorporate a library component focusing on contemporary
newspaper/periodical accounts of British female travellers.
11. Essay consultation and preparation
Additional Resources:
Adams, Percy. Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: University
of Kentucky Press, 1983)
Alloula, Malek. The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich, intro.
Barbara Harlow(1981; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986).
Behdad, Ali. Belated Travellers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Cork:
Cork University Press, 1994).
Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 33.
Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1988).
Duncan, S. H. Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing (London: Routledge, 1999).
Frank, Katherine. Lucie Duff Gordon: A Passage to Egypt (London: Hamish Hamilton,
1994), 291.
Gikandi, Simon. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism
New York: Columbia University Press, 1996)
Hatem, Mervat. ‘Through Each Other’s Eyes: Egyptian, Levantine-Egyptian, and European
Women’s Images of Themselves and of Each Other (1862-1920)’, Women’s Studies International
Forum, 12/2: 192.
Helms, Mary W. Ulysses’ Sail: Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge and
Geographical Distance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983)
Hooper, Glen, Perspectives on Travel Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004)
Hulme, Peter and Youngs, Tim. The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
McKenzie, John. Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1995).
Mills, Sara. Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and
Colonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1991)
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and
New York: Routledge, 1992)
Said, Edward. Orientalism
Yeazell, Ruth. Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2000)