Highlights the social and textual complexity of the transatlantic world for American women writers

A number of nineteenth-century American women were privileged and daring enough to travel abroad, using a range of genres to respond discursively to their new surrounding. The author's study groups six women, whose writings were shaped by their encounters with Italy, to investigate women's attempts to leave behind the domestic, in all senses of that term. --book cover.

The author has analyzed, sorted, and organized material from almost 500 accounts of travels in Great Britain into a veritable cavalcade of social history. This is a book filled with life and vitality, written with a light touch and always with an eye to social comedy. It presents a true and realistic picture of these people and their periods.