Imagining Niagara: Victorian British Lady Travellers in North America
Imagining Niagara: Victorian British Lady Travellers in North America

Summary/Abstract: This paper reflects my interest in nineteenth-century British travel literature, several of my previous studies being dedicated to examining accounts of such journeys to the restricted space of Central and Eastern Europe, Romania included. I have decided to extend the geography of my research having in mind the great mobility and dynamism that characterized British travel and exploration in a century that brought about not only the imperial expansion but also the enlargement of knowledge, be it imperial or not, related to power or not. There is an extraordinarily rich and complex corpus of nineteenth-century British travel literature and I have decided to start my research restricting not only the geography of travel but mostly the social and gender category of the travellers: Victorian ladies’ descriptions of distant landscapes, particularly Niagara Falls. The tenacious character, intellectual posture and artistic skills of the British lady travellers, tourists, and explorers at the same time, are quite impressive. So is the quality of postcolonial and feminist critical works dedicated to the subject, especially those by Sidney Foster, Sara Mills, Amanda Gilroy, Dorothy Middleton, Mary Baine Campbell, Dea Birkett, Marion Tinling and so on. My paper represents an initial step in this endeavour. British lady travellers, such as Harriet Martineau, Isabella Bird, Marianne North, Emily Pfeiffer and Frances Trollope, Frances Wright, Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley etc dared to cross not only their frustrating feminine condition in Victorian England from which they tried hard to escape by travelling abroad (helped by their social status too, indeed), but also the boundaries between disciplines set by the Enlightened reason.

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