Claudia Capancioni is Professor of English Literature at Lincoln Bishop University, UKMariaconcetta Costantini is Professor of English Literature at G. d’Annunzio University, Chieti-Pescara, ItalyJulia Kuehn is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands

• Re-examining nineteenth-century Easts: an introduction – Claudia Capancioni, Mariaconcetta Costantini and Julia KuehnSection 1: EASTERN EUROPE AND THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE1 An Orientalist view of Eastern Europe at the end of the long nineteenth century: analysing Baroness Orczy’s autobiographical novel, A Son of the People – Agnes Strickland-Pajtok2 Mary Edith Durham in Albania: rethinking identity across geographic, generic and gender boundaries – Mariaconcetta Costantini3 Ottoman women in transition in Mary Adelaide Walker’s Eastern Life and Scenery – Elisabetta MarinoSection 2: EGYPT4 Lucie Duff Gordon’s palimpsestuous views of Egypt – Claudia Capancioni5 ‘Transported bodily into the Arabian Nights’: Janet Ross’s Egyptian fascination in The Fourth Generation: Reminiscences (1912) – Claudia Zilletti6 Trollope’s unprotected females in the East – Kristine SwensonSection 3: INDIA7 Transnational encounters in Anglophone Indian women’s writing – Éadaoin Agnew8 The women of Reynolds’s ‘East’: The Sepoys, or Highland Jessie – Rebecca Nesvet9 ‘Be still and listen’: encountering and understanding the East in Margaret Harkness’s writings – Greta Perletti10 Marriage and female self-abnegation and heroism in Flora Annie Steel’s ‘Uma Himavutee’ and ‘The Sorrowful Hour’ (1897) – Graziella Stringos & Mireille VilaSection 4: THE MIDDLE AND FAR EAST11 New nineteenth-century perspectives on the Middle East through the travelogues of Italian women writers Amalia Nizzoli and Cristina Trivulzio di Belgioioso – Giulia Nonno12 Dangerous encounters: British women travellers and unwanted proximity in late nineteenth-century China – Silvia Granata13 ‘I am beginning to enter the joys of a naturalist’: Anna Forbes’s explorations of the Malay Archipelago – Laurence Talairach14 Lessons in loyalty: gender, kinship and politics in Mary Crawford Fraser’s Japan – Helena EsserIndex