Seeking Cultural Authority in Unbeaten Paths: Amelia Edwards’s Journeys Through the Dolomites and Egypt.

Abstract

Amelia B. Edwards was a versatile and prolific literary figure of the Victorian period. From a very early age she excelled in many artistic fields, but writing represented for her the most suitable means to earn her living, as she made the arduous choice not to marry and depend on a husband. Edwards worked mainly as a novelist, journalist, Egyptologist and travel writer. Her successful travel books, entitled Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys (1873) and A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1877), are the outcomes of two extended journeys through the Dolomites and Egypt respectively. Amelia Edwards is a perfect example of those independent women travellers who sought alternative identities for themselves, far from the constraints of Victorian British society; these unconventional women took advantage of the popularity of travel writing in order to enhance their cultural authority, and during the nineteenth century a great quantity of travel texts narrating their adventures were published. Amelia Edwards’s travelogues are the main focus of this dissertation and, through the analysis of some significant passages, I will show how the process of acquiring social esteem and recognition through travel writing was not immediate. Indeed, women writers were considered suitable for writing novels and poems, and the non-fictional genre of travel writing was thought to be a male prerogative. Therefore, a particular tension is noticeable in Amelia Edwards’s travel writing, as she employed several devices to find her own voice while still making use of masculine literary stratagems which reveal the typical aggressive posture of the colonizing British culture towards the rest of the world.