Women and the travel guidebook, 1870-c.1910
Keywords: travel guidebook
women's history
medieval towns series
general interest guidebook
scholarly guidebook
travel history
Italy
women's rest tour association
practical guidebook

Despite the large printing giants of John Murray and Karl Baedeker dominating the nineteenth-century travel guidebook market, women were important producers and consumers of travel guidebooks between 1870–c.1914. My thesis argues that in the late nineteenth century, women were key cultural producers of travel guidebooks, an important form of non-fiction mass media, during an upsurge and shift in European travel and tourism. While a few studies have identified a small number of female-authored guidebooks, this is the first to take a broad view of women’s place within the guidebook market, situating female-authored texts within a large and competitive book market to understand the role of gender in guidebook publication. Like the guidebooks it focuses on, this thesis is interdisciplinary in nature. It straddles book and publishing history, women’s history, the history of travel, and cultural history. Drawing on Robert Darnton’s theory of the communications circuit which considers the roles of the author, publisher, bookseller, and readers in the production of print as circular and emphasizes the system as a holistic process, this thesis investigates the role of women as both readers and writers of guidebooks. I argue that the line between the role of writer and reader was often blurred. My thesis also draws from Georg Simmel’s theory of the web of group affiliations to stress the significance of social networks to women’s guidebook writing, as well as to argue for the inclusion of some among those examined into the framework of intellectual aristocracy, expanding this group beyond the predominantly male and England-focused studies of Noel Annan and William Whyte.
The sources underpinning this study are 367 guidebooks to Europe, with a primary focus on Italy as a destination, as well as a large body of unpublished correspondence. Given Italy’s historic religious, cultural, and artistic significance to the Anglophone world, guides to Italy were perhaps the most numerous among all the guidebooks targeted at travellers from the United Kingdom and North America in the nineteenth-century. The resurgent interest in Italy as a tourist destination during the latter-half of the nineteenth century, coupled with the growth in middle-class tourism and improvements to travel infrastructure, provided new audiences for guidebooks, and innovations in print manufacturing and copyright laws allowed more guides to flood the market. Focusing on guides to Italy thus centres attention on a particularly dynamic segment of the guidebook market. While my thesis aims to take a wider view of women in the guidebook market, it also offers a case study of a specific series with a significant number of women authors and illustrators, the Medieval Towns Series (1898–1939). A sociogram of all the female authors of this series, and of their larger social networks is included as an appendix, along with a brief biography of each person for context. The thesis is organized into two parts, each consisting of three chapters.
Part one examines the conditions which precipitated an increasing number of female-authored guidebooks. Chapter one explores the nineteenth-century English language guidebook market for guidebooks to Italy, highlighting trends in guidebook publishing that led to the development of three subgenres (general interest, practical, and scholarly) within the market. Investigating the late-nineteenth century market for guidebooks to Italy, this chapter reveals the diversity and range of the genre beyond the large franchises of John Murray and Karl Baedeker. The chapter argues that guidebooks of different subgenres were created and marketed in ways that were intended to avoid direct competition with one another. This particular feature of the market presented the perfect conditions for women to write guides, as it created niches in the market where women could stake their claim. While women writers were active in all three identified subgenres, they published most often in the practical and scholarly subgenres. The oversaturation of the market and the relative monopoly over general interest guidebooks by large franchise names served as a deterrent for women writers interested in the general guidebook subgenre. Also paying particular attention to the way the gender of the traveller was addressed in big franchise guides, the second part of Chapter One argues that advice tailored to women was often missing or overly conservative in general interest guides. In response, practical guides were created to address underrepresented concerns, particularly when it came to negotiations around gender and behaviour in foreign countries. The chapter concludes by examining how women writers authored practical guidebooks to address the absence of travel advice for women in general interest guides and responded to issues that arose from conflicting expectations of feminine behaviour across different cultural contexts.
Chapter Two aims to complicate the idea of the female guidebook reader, arguing that women readers used guidebooks in complex ways, often blurring or erasing boundaries between the identities of traveller/tourist and of reader/writer. This chapter draws on the idea of the communications circuit to explore the heavily intertwined relationship between reading and writing. Responses to general interest guidebooks are explored using women’s travel accounts and correspondence, showing the diversity of experiences in the actual use of guides. Through an examination of guidebook reading by women authors, the chapter demonstrates that women writers used their awareness of the guidebook market to shape their own writing. Highlighting the practice of co-production in guidebook publishing and women’s involvement in the editing and revision process of larger franchises, this chapter again brings the reader back into the production process. The final section demonstrates how guidebook reading bled into diary and journal writing, and how the common practice of readers adding marginalia to guides eventually altered the way guidebooks were physically constructed by publishers.
The final chapter in part one explores the scholarly guidebook, arguing that this subgenre offered women interested in pursuing scholarly research and receiving public recognition for their work, a space to do so when routes into scholarly publishing might be restricted for women. Like the practical guide, this subgenre was created to provide more in-depth and nuanced information than what was available in general interest guides. Reflecting on readers and the guidebook audience, part one of this chapter links the desire to claim a traveller identity to a market for guidebooks with more rigorous scholarship and an appreciation for art and history. The second part of the chapter examines the relationship between the scholarly guidebook and the immediate conditions under which it was created by focusing on the context, construction of, and reader response to Walks in Florence (1873), the first scholarly guidebook to Italy written by women, Susan and Joanna Horner. As the first of its kind, Walks in Florence set the foundation for women’s scholarly guidebook writing in the period and the important elements that ensured its success provide insights into key characteristics of women’s scholarly guidebook publishing, including access to resources, education, and the importance of social class and social connections. This section showcases the scholarly guidebook as an avenue for women’s participation in intellectual discourse and demonstrates the success and public recognition they could receive for their scholarship.
Expanding on the insights of part one, part two of the thesis develops a case study of the Medieval Towns Series, a scholarly guidebook series which boasted many women producers, and which has until now, gone unstudied. Through an examination of the creation and use of social networks in the Medieval Towns Series (MTS), Chapter Four argues that social networks—belonging to certain groups and knowing specific actors (persons or groups)—were critical in facilitating women’s scholarly and artistic careers in guidebook publishing. Through the creation and development of such networks, women accessed the education, training, mentorship, and resources needed to succeed in the scholarly guidebook market. Exploration of the MTS guidebook writers’ networks reveals that female scholarly guidebook producers were members of a cultural elite which flourished at the end of the century. Chapter Five expands on the role of networks by investigating the ways in which the spaces of Italy promoted, facilitated, and cultivated opportunities for women’s guidebook production. Grounding the Medieval Towns Series and its important and wide-reaching networks more firmly in Italy, this chapter focuses on three important spaces that promoted favourable conditions for guidebook production: the library, the hotel, and the villa. Building on insights from Chapter Four about the significance of complex social networks, this chapter argues that these key spaces in Italy were favourable to guidebook production in many ways; it demonstrates that these spaces fostered the social networks upon which women relied for their professional development. Chapter Five also expands our understanding of ‘intellectual aristocracy’ in two ways: by demonstrating that the women of the MTS were members of the group, and by demonstrating that this group was more international in nature than previously believed.
Finally, Chapter Six focuses on the development of women’s professional identities and authority through the writing and illustration of Medieval Towns guidebooks. Interrogating the scholarly guidebook more closely, the chapter argues that this genre offered women a platform to pursue their non-fiction writing careers and develop or extend their identities as scholars, artists, and writers at various stages of their professional lives. The Medieval Towns Series offers unique insights into the professional development of women in the guidebook market as well as the wider literary world. Using Alison Chapman’s criteria through which women might claim the standing of professional writers, the chapter is divided into three sections: claiming authority, financial success, and reputation. The first section analyzes how guidebook writing cultivated intellectual authority and enabled women to establish or reaffirm identities as scholars and artists. Part two of the chapter uncovers the financial aspect of guidebook publishing, arguing that women attempted to exert control over the financial aspect of publishing in a professional manner. Finally, using published reviews and private correspondence, the last part of the chapter looks at the reputations women gained from guidebook writing and the results of their acclaim. Throughout, the chapter seeks to underline the professional approach of women guidebook writers, demonstrating the degree to which women sought to control various elements of their work and careers.
This thesis extends historical knowledge of women’s non-fiction publishing and reveals trends in women’s guidebook production that have previously been ignored. It demonstrates that women were active in shaping the late-nineteenth century guidebook market, and in turn, uncovers the means through which women could use guidebook writing to further their political, professional, scholarly, or artistic aspirations. In studying women’s production of travel guides, the thesis offers new and exciting insights into women’s history, history of the book, and travel history in the fin-de-siècle.