Solitary Travelers: Nineteenth Century Women's Travel Narratives and the Scientific Vocation

Taking a biographical casebook approach, this study examines four women writers of natural history who travelled between the 1790s and 1890s. Focussing on the travel writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Martineau, Isabella Bird Bishop, and Mary Kingsley, four women who primarily travelled alone, 'Solitary Travelers' asks what sort of rhetorical strategies were used by women to move popularly accessible travel accounts into the scientific, professional sphere during a time when opportunities for women to engage in natural history field work became more and more restricted.