Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784-1814

Description

In the last days of the Scandinavian journey that would become the basis of her great post-Revolutionary travel book, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote, 'I am weary of travelling - yet seem to have no home - no resting place to look to - I am strangely cast off'. From this starting point, Ingrid Horrocks reveals the significance of representations of women wanderers in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, particularly in the work of women writers. She follows gendered, frequently reluctant wanderers beyond travel narratives into poetry, gothic romances, and sentimental novels, and places them within a long history of uses of the more traditional literary figure of the male wanderer. Drawing out the relationship between mobility and affect, and illuminating textual forms of wandering, Horrocks shows how paying attention to the figure of the woman wanderer sheds new light on women and travel, and alters assumptions about mobility's connection with freedom.

Ingrid Horrocks completed a doctorate at Princeton University, New Jersey, before taking up a job at Massey University, Wellington. She has been a Commonwealth Scholar and in 2009 she was awarded a prestigious Marsden Fast-Start Award by the Royal Society of New Zealand. She is the author of a travel book as well as of articles published in journals including Studies in Travel Writing, Studies in Romanticism, and English Literary History (ELH). She is also the editor of an edition of Mary Wollstonecraft's only travel book, co-editor of an edition of Charlotte Smith's poems, and the author of the pre-1840 chapter of A History of New Zealand Literature (2016).

'This interdisciplinary, cross-genre study clarifies the general features of wandering as well as the fine differences between wanderers, offering an insightful view of not only male Romanticists' wanderlust but also women writers' 'wanderlost' - lost in their painfully perpetual movement.' Sijie Wang, Review Journal for the Study of Culture 'Focusing on close readings of four texts by women writers, she develops overarching theories on the radically different experience that wandering - conceived as aimless rather than purposeful travel - represents for a woman as opposed to a man, and how that translates into unnerving difficulties 'on the level of thought process, of interaction, of syntax, and of narrative, as well as of literal movement in the world'. Horrocks sees her eighteenth-century women writers as 'regendering the sentimental journey', and their works as the intellectual seeds of a more fruitful way of approaching early modern literature: 'I propose wandering', she writes, 'as another new critical term to be productively employed not only to explore the 'sustaining structure' of late eighteenth-century prose fictions but also the idiosyncratic, and often apparently random formal movements of texts across a range of genres in the eighteenth century.' The Times Literary Supplement 'Depictions of reluctant women wanderers in women's texts highlight the social reasons for homelessness, the psychological and material costs of wandering, and the non-traditional narrative structures necessary to give voice to these stories. Horrocks proposes 'wandering' as cross-genre term that embraces the open-ended and digressive aspects of the travel narrative. Her deft analysis of form ... responds to the question, 'what might monotony, repetition, a failure to move forward, a wandering rather than developing narrative structure, be able to express?' ... Horrocks brilliantly reads form at the levels of genre, narrative structure, and sentence.' Elizabeth A. Dolan, European Romantic Review 'For a book about alienation, exile, loss, and failure, Ingrid Horrocks's Women Wanderers is a joy to read. Horrocks argues that women's writing about wandering in the long eighteenth century mirrors its thematic concerns in formal innovations, so that not only characters within their work but also the texts themselves wander, frustrating readers' expectations of reaching a point or a view. Concentrating on Charlotte Smith's poetry, especially The Emigrants (1793) and Elegiac Sonnets (1784), Ann Radcliffe's gothic fiction, Mary Wollstonecraft's travel writing, and Frances Burney's final novel, The Wanderer (1814), Horrocks brings together insightful literary analysis with recent developments in mobility studies to reflect upon how these authors represent the figure of the woman wanderer in texts that have been criticized for wandering themselves. Instead of apologizing for the wandering form of her selected texts, she makes the formal choices of Smith Wollstonecraft, and Burney the focal points of her analyses.' Andrew McInnes, Eighteenth Century Fiction 'Horrocks' carefully-researched and illuminating study establishes Romantic-era women writers as significant contributors to debates over social sympathy that continue to resonate at a moment when war and weather cast ever more people from their homes.' The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 'Horrocks brilliantly constructs a model for examining women's travel writing in the more restrictive domain of mobility, one that contains both the yearning for a larger expressive canvas and the gendered anxieties and their displacements that such yearning provokes.' Elizabeth Fay, Studies in Romanticism 'Where many studies have construed travel and mobility as inherently liberating activities, Horrocks focuses instead on the depiction - in Romantic-era poetry, fiction and travel writing - of a variety of reluctant, sometimes coerced women travellers, for whom mobility represents not freedom and empowerment but dislocation and powerlessness. ... In their hands, Horrocks argues persuasively, this motif not only becomes more harrowing but is also the vehicle for much more resonant and far-reaching critiques of social injustice, gender relations and modernity. This is a highly original topic, and one which Horrocks pursues with an exemplary blend of theoretical sophistication and sensitive, always illuminating close reading.' Carl Thompson, Studies in Travel Writing '... this study brings welcome attention to some less familiar texts and performs a skilful rebalancing of the critical literature on 'distressed women' in Romantic writing-amply demonstrating their significance to emerging perceptions of 'an increasingly mobile world'.' Robin Jarvis, The BARS Review