Lady Anne Blunt was a woman ahead of her time. After marrying the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in 1869, the pair travelled extensively in the Middle East, developing an especial fondness for the region and its people. In this book, Lisa Lacy explores the life, travels and political ideas of Lady Anne. With a broad knowledge of the Arab world, she challenged prevailing assumptions and, as a result of her aristocratic heritage, exerted strong influence in British political circles. Her extensive journeys in the Mediterranean region, North Africa, Egypt, Arabia, Syria, Iraq and Persia formed the basis of her knowledge about the Middle East. She pursued an intimate knowledge of Bedouin life in Arabia, the town culture of Syria and Mesopotamia and the politics of nationalism in Egypt. Her husband, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, gained a reputation as an anti-imperialist political activist. Lacy shows that Lady Anne was her husband's partner in marriage, politics and travel and exerted strong influence not only on his ideas, but on the ideas of the British political elite of the era.

Leaving behind Thailand after the 2004 Tsunami, Ben, aged 19, made a life challenging journey without GPS or mobile phone to cross 11 countries in 8 months covering at least 16,000 miles, not including the occasional detour or missed direction. This is his log of the journey home... "What comes through most clearly is the sheer excitement of travelling in SE Asia when you're young, and seeing so many amazing things for the first time. This is a great account of the traveller's life, in which random encounters become critical junctures and you find yourself somewhere unfamiliar every day." Tom Feiling - "Short walks in Bogota"

Hogg left a written record of three of his many journeys to the Highlands, those of 1802, 1803 and 1804, and in "Highland Journeys" he offers a thoughtful and deeply-felt response to the Highland Clearances. He gives vivid pictures of his experiences, including a narrow escape from a Navy press-gang, and a Sacrament day with one minister preaching in English and another in Gaelic. Hogg also explains aspects of Gaelic culture such as the waulking songs, and he describes the trade in kelp, lucrative to the landowners but back-breaking and ill-paid for the workers. Highland Journeys makes a refreshing contribution to our understanding of early nineteenth-century travel writing.

In these two closely linked works - a travel book and a biography of its author - we witness a moving encounter between two of the most daring and original minds of the late eighteenth century: A Short Residence in Sweden is the record of Wollstonecraft's last journey in search of happiness, into the remote and beautiful backwoods of Scandinavia. The quest for a lost treasure ship, the pain of a wrecked love affair, memories of the French Revolution, and the longing for some Golden Age, all shape this vivid narrative, which Richard Holmes argues is one of the neglected masterpieces of early English Romanticism.

Memoirs is Godwin's own account of Wollstonecraft's life, written with passionate intensity a few weeks after her tragic death. Casting aside literary convention, Godwin creates an intimate portrait of his wife, startling in its candour and psychological truth. Received with outrage by friends and critics alike, and virtually suppressed for a century, it can now be recognized as one of the landmarks in the development of modern biography.

The 'memsahibs' of the British Raj in India are well-known figures today, frequently depicted in fiction, TV and film. In recent years, they have also become the focus of extensive scholarship. Less familiar to both academics and the general public, however, are the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century precursors to the memsahibs of the Victorian and Edwardian era. Yet British women also visited and resided in India in this earlier period, witnessing first-hand the tumultuous, expansionist decades in which the East India Company established British control over the subcontinent. Some of these travellers produced highly regarded accounts of their experiences, thereby inaugurating a rich tradition of women's travel writing about India. In the process, they not only reported events and developments in the subcontinent, they also contributed to them, helping to shape opinion and policy on issues such as colonial rule, religion, and social reform. This new set in the Chawton House Library Women's Travel Writing series assembles seven of these accounts, six by British authors (Jemima Kindersley, Maria Graham, Eliza Fay, Ann Deane, Julia Maitland and Mary Sherwood) and one by an American (Harriet Newell). Their narratives - here reproduced for the first time in reset scholarly editions - were published between 1777 and 1854, and recount journeys undertaken in India, or periods of residence there, between the 1760s and the 1830s. Collectively they showcase the range of women's interests and activities in India, and also the variety of narrative forms, voices and personae available to them as travel writers. Some stand squarely in the tradition of Enlightenment ethnography; others show the growing influence of Evangelical beliefs. But all disrupt any lingering stereotypes about women's passivity, reticence and lack of public agency in this period, when colonial women were not yet as sequestered and debarred from cross-cultural contact as they would later be during the Raj. Their narratives are consequently a useful resource to students and researchers across multiple fields and disciplines, including women's writing, travel writing, colonial and postcolonial studies, the history of women's educational and missionary work, and Romantic-era and nineteenth-century literature. This volume includes two texts, Ann Deane, A Tour Through the Upper Provinces of Hindostan (1823) and Julia Maitland, Letters from Madras (1846).

The world of Sir John Mandeville was bounded by fantasy, superstition, and dread. For most Europeans, knowledge of other countries was limited to tales brought back by the few people that had travelled beyond their borders. In the England of the 14th century, the vast majority would have viewed a visit to the next village as a major event. Sir John Mandeville was one of the intrepid few who ventured beyond, at least according to his own book. His account of his adventures first appeared in the late 1400s and became an instant "best-seller." His tales of devils in the Valley Perilous, men with eyes in their shoulders, and ants that filled empty jars on the backs of horses with gold fascinated Europe. He also learned that diamonds had gender and, with little encouragement, would breed while protecting their owner from all harm.

Turkey, Egypt, and Syria: A Travelogue vividly captures the experiences of prominent Indian intellectual and scholar Shibli- Nu'ma-ni- (1857-1914) as he journeyed across the Ottoman Empire and Egypt in 1892. A professor of Arabic and Persian at the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental (MAO) College at Aligarh, Nu'ma-ni- took a six-month leave from teaching to travel to the Ottoman Empire in search of rare printed works and manuscripts to use as sources for a series of biographies on major figures in Islamic history. Along the way, he collected information on schools, curricula, publishers, and newspapers, presenting a unique portrait of imperial culture at a transformative moment in the history of the Middle East. Nu'ma-ni- records sketches and anecdotes that offer rare glimpses of intellectual networks, religious festivals, visual and literary culture, and everyday life in the Ottoman Empire and Egypt. First published in 1894, the travelogue has since become a classic of Urdu travel writing and has been immensely influential in the intellectual and politicalhistory of South Asia. This translation, the first into English, includes contemporary reviews of the travelogue, letters written by the author during his travels, and serialized newspaper reports about the journey, and is deeply enriched for readers and students by the translator's copious multilingual glosses and annotations. Nu'ma-ni- 's chronicle offers unique insight into broader processes of historical change in this part of the world while also providing a rare glimpse of intellectual engagement and exchange across the porous borders of empire.