Early Women's Travel Writing: Rare but There

Early women's travel writing isn't quite a genre, and admittedly there were few women travel writers in Ancient times.

Those women who could write tended not to travel - they were often nuns. Those who did travel usually did so with their husbands - and often couldn't write. We often have to read books by men to find out about women who traveled...

They were from many parts of the world - Ban Zhao from China, Eudocia Augusta from Athens, Sugarawara no Takasue no musume from Japan, Margery Kempe from England, Gulbadan Bigam from Afghanistan... these women, who often lived at court or were at least well-off, wrote mostly of their pilgrimages and of travels with their husbands.

Early women's travel writing changed around the 17th century when it began to portray women traveling on their own or simply for pleasure. The Frenchwoman Marie Catherine le Jumel de Barneville, Baronne d'Aulnoy, traveled extensively in Spain and England and wrote her most popular works based on these trips.

It took the 18th century to see a dramatic proliferation of travel writing by women - again, largely because more women were learning to write.

Travel was also becoming more common, for leisure as well as business. Women often accompanied their husbands on trips and had plenty of free time to write their memoirs and tales of travel. People were also beginning to travel longer distances - especially the English, who wandered not only to the sunny South of Europe but far afield to Africa and Asia.

A wave of intrepid English women travelers left their mark on literature during this period. Elizabeth Craven wrote about her travels through Crimea and Constantinople - and her description of the Ottomans was scathing: they were clumsy, lazy, politically corrupt, corpulent - and Turkish coffee was bad. The editorial (as opposed to descriptive) style of writing was being shaped but often, the comparisons fared badly, with new lands comparing poorly to back home.

Thankfully, not everyone was this critical.

Mary Wollstonecraft, an early women's advocate and philosopher, traveled to Scandinavia, describing the breathtaking scenery and her connection to it. Mariana Starke wrote the first European travel guide, and May Crommelin, from northern Ireland, went further afield, to the Andes, the Caribbean and North Africa.

It took time to take off, but early women's travel writing paved the way for the 20th-century women who would scour the world and write about it.