Abstract

During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, travel and tourism in Scotland changed radically, from a time when there were very few travellers and no provision for those that there were, through to Scotland’s emergence as a fully fledged tourist destination with the necessary physical and economic infrastructure. As the experience of travelling in Scotland changed, so too did the ways in which travellers wrote about their experiences. Tourists and Travellers explores the changing nature of travel and of travel writing in and about Scotland, focusing on the writings of five women - Sarah Murray, Anne Grant, Dorothy Wordsworth, Sarah Hazlitt and the anonymous female author of A Journey to the Highlands of Scotland. It further examines the specific ways in which those women represented themselves and their travels and looks at the relationship of gender to travel writing, relating that to issues of production and reception as well as to questions of discourse.

The book’s ability to address four objectives, which are also framed as cross-cutting themes and revisited throughout the book, is very effective. Hagglund achieves the multiple objectives she sets out for herself, and provides a delightful multi-layered examination of English women’s travels to Scotland through the writing each of these five women produced.

Betty Hagglund is a Research Fellow on the â??Maria Graham: The Woman Writer and the Cultures of Travel, Science and Publishing in the early 19th centuryâ?? project at Nottingham Trent University. She has published extensively on travel writing and womenâ??s writing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is the editor of three volumes of womenâ??s nineteenth-century travel writing about Italy published by Pickering and Chatto.

Combining scrupulous close readings, extensive archival researches and a nuanced understanding of the latest theoretical debates in this area, this volume makes a very useful and highly stimulating contribution both to travel writing studies and to women's studies.

Comprehensively and lucidly linking gender with the geography, literary conventions, and historical meanings of English tourism in Scotland between 1770 and 1830, Tourists and Travellers is at the cutting edge of scholarship on women's travel writing.

The book unites tourism and women’s studies and draws on history, geography and English literature to produce some perceptive and original insights into travel writing and its underlying dynamics. Hagglund successfully demonstrates how the analysis of travel writing illuminates the character and situation of the writer, the society and the era in which they lived and the conditions in the locations travelled through. There is evidence of extensive research and a depth of knowledge which allows her to comment with authority on the subject. The book complements existing literature and is a useful contribution to the ongoing debates about the role of women writers and the impact of gender on travel discourses. It also illustrates tourism development processes and the multiple factors which act as determinants. Scholars with a particular interest in the women cited and Scottish tourism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will find it an especially welcome source of stimulating ideas, information and guidance about further reading.