Juxtaposing the albums of Lady Brassey, an overlooked figure among Victorian women travelers, with Brassey's travel books, Nancy Micklewright takes advantage of a unique opportunity to examine the role of photography in the 1870s and 1880s in constructing ideas about place and empire. This study draws on a range of source material to investigate aspects of the Brassey collection. The book begins with an overview of Lady Brassey's life and projects, as well as an examination of issues relevant to subsequent discussions of the travel literature, the photographs, and the albums in which the photographs are assembled. Lady Brassey is next considered as a traveler and public figure, and the author gives an overview of Brassey's travel literature, placing her in her social and political context. Micklewright then considers the seventy volumes of photographs which comprise the Brassey album collection, taking an especially close look at the eight albums devoted to the Middle East. Analyzing the specific contents and structure of the albums, and the interplay of text and image within, she explores how the Brasseys constructed their presentation of the region. While confirming some earlier work about constructions of the Orient by the British during the time, this book offers a much more detailed and nuanced understanding of how photographic and literary constructions were related to individual experience and identity within a larger British identity. The first appendix explores the illustrative relationship between the photograph albums and Lady Brassey's travel books, yielding an understanding of the processes involved in transferring the photographic image to a printed one, at a particular moment in the development of book illustration. A second appendix lists the contents and named photographers of all seventy albums in the Brassey collection. All in all, Micklewright's study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the complex and unstable social, political and imperialist discourses in the nineteenth century.

Juxtaposing the albums of Lady Brassey, an overlooked figure among Victorian women travelers, with Brassey's travel books, Nancy Micklewright takes advantage of a unique opportunity to examine the role of photography in the 1870s and 1880s in constructing ideas about place and empire. This study draws on a range of source material to investigate aspects of the Brassey collection. The book begins with an overview of Lady Brassey's life and projects, as well as an examination of issues relevant to subsequent discussions of the travel literature, the photographs, and the albums in which the photographs are assembled. Lady Brassey is next considered as a traveler and public figure, and the author gives an overview of Brassey's travel literature, placing her in her social and political context. Micklewright then considers the seventy volumes of photographs which comprise the Brassey album collection, taking an especially close look at the eight albums devoted to the Middle East. Analyzing the specific contents and structure of the albums, and the interplay of text and image within, she explores how the Brasseys constructed their presentation of the region. While confirming some earlier work about constructions of the Orient by the British during the time, this book offers a much more detailed and nuanced understanding of how photographic and literary constructions were related to individual experience and identity within a larger British identity. The first appendix explores the illustrative relationship between the photograph albums and Lady Brassey's travel books, yielding an understanding of the processes involved in transferring the photographic image to a printed one, at a particular moment in the development of book illustration. A second appendix lists the contents and named photographers of all seventy albums in the Brassey collection. All in all, Micklewright's study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the complex and unstable social, political and imperialist discourses in the nineteenth century.

"Gender, Modernity and Liberty" presents a dialogue between Western and Middle Eastern women that is often presumed never to have happened. Not only were women from the Middle East imagined to be shut up in a harem all day without access to education, ideas or the outside world, but the extent to which Western women travellers were able to engage with women in the regions they visited has often been overlooked. This pioneering collection provides substantial extracts from Ottoman, Egyptian and British and American writers - each with a biographical and literary introduction - that trace the development of an intellectual, personal and critical dialogue between women over a period of accelerated social change marked by Arab nationalism and Egypt's move to independence, and the establishment of the Turkish Republic at the end of the Ottoman Empire. The ways in which the role of woman as either guardian of tradition or in the vanguard of change was hotly contested in both countries and by all sides of the political spectrum is explained in an editors' introduction and photo-essay that set up the common themes of the collection. "Gender, Modernity and Liberty" includes writings by Halide Edib, Musbah Haidar, Hoda Shaarawi, Emine Foat Tugay, Demetra Vaka Brown, Zeyneb Hanoum, Lady Annie Brassey, Grace Ellison, Annie Harvey, Emmeline Lott, Sophia Poole and Ruth Woodsmall. Participating in local and international debates, they wrote about the harem, polygyny, nationalism and modernism and commented on fashion alongside discussions about feminism and slavery, knowing all the while that their books were likely to be read through the exoticising frame of Western Orientalist stereotype. Their success in negotiating the very constraints that provided the - often prurient - market for their books, reveals a will to self-determination that speaks to the challenges still faced today by women from the Middle East and the Muslim world.