Women and the Travel Guidebook, 1870-C.1910

Although the printing giants of John Murray and Karl Baedeker dominated the nineteenth-century travel guidebook market, women were important producers and consumers of guides. This book 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 limited number of 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. 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 and therefore form a key focus of this study.

Jasmine Proteau is a museum curator and historian specializing in travel and gender history who received her DPhil from the University of Oxford, UK.