Product Description

'An utterly absorbing account, brilliantly researched and written, of women's lives and travels in the 18th-century.' Katie Hickman According to 'The Art of Governing A Wife' (1747), women in Georgian England were supposed to 'lay up and save, look to the house; talk to few and take of all within'. However, some broke from these taboos and took up the previously male privilege of travelling to the Continent to develop mind, spirit and body. Hearing of the delights of the Grand Tour from pioneering friends, increasing numbers of English ladies set off to sample foreign lands from which many returned apparently 'the best informed and most perfect creatures'. For others the Grand Tour was an intellectual and romantic rite of passage, widening their knowledge of society, love and politics and inspiring a genre of literary fiction all of its own. Brian Dolan leads us into the hearts and minds of the ladies through the stories, thoughts and court gossip recorded in their journals, letters and diaries.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #60023 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Review
'A marvellous shackle-breaking drama![the lives of these] extraordinary, trend-setting female travellers.' Sunday Telegraph 'A fascinating subject.' Sunday Times 'What shines out in a finely researched and presented work is the uncommon fortitude of these early travellers.' Daily Telegraph

NEWSPAPER REVIEW
Sunday Times "what shines out in a finely researched and presented work is the uncommon fortitude of these early travellers";

About the Author
Brian Dolan is a young American historian who received his doctorate from Cambridge University in 1995. He has been a history lecturer in Sweden, London (at the Wellcome Institute) and is currently Wellcome Research Lecturer at the University of East Anglia.

Customer Reviews

why did it take so long for these stories to be told?
I like reading history books and this was one of the most interesting I have read for a while, but I am left wondering just how many more interesting voices from the past are left untold. This book, which explains how and why a number of different women from the eighteenth century were able to travel abroad, I think does well to cover a good sampling of lost experiences (some told here in more depth than others, which I prefer since they offer fascinating 'mini stories'), but I'm left wondering how many others were able to travel and explore different customs and people. Real history, I guess, does not have all the answers, but if there are more women like Mary Berry (a woman who took charge of her fathers and sisters life and convinced them to go to Europe in search of a better way of life) or Helen Maria Williams (who, like her friend Mary Wollstonecraft wanted to be in Paris to see the revolution and ended up living there) and others, then I want to know about them.

Riveting and relevant, a series of stories well told.
I found this a refreshing book--for me it captures the excitement and stimulation of travel without at all diminishing the intellectual or emotional consequences of it. The desires these women had to travel and their commitment to do so make it a compelling, if also sometimes racy, read.