Mapping Wider Worlds

Mapping Wider Worlds uncovers how early professional women writers in Britain invented a genre of women's travel fiction in an era of increased mobility and exploration. As marketplace authorship began to take shape, writers such as Delarivier Manley, Mary Davys, Penelope Aubin, and Eliza Haywood turned to this genre to challenge the link between women's travel and promiscuity, positioning travel instead as a site of knowledge production and self-discovery. In this book, Yoojung Choi reveals how these women authors not only reshaped cultural attitudes toward women's mobility, but also redefined professional authorship in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, preceding and paving the way for travel literature by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hester Piozzi, and Mary Wollstonecraft.