Women’s travel writing: approach to the vision of Spain in the stories of six foreign women writers

Abstract

Travel literature is a genre well known by historiography; researchers have analyzed from journeys of Antiquity to Contemporaneity. Nevertheless, traditionally, those studies had shown a special interest in travel literature produced by masculine subjects, whereas that literature produced by female writers had been to a lesser extent. A fact that has been corrected in recent times thanks to the work of some authors who have tried to analyze the women’s travel writing. Therefore, within the current indicated, in this work we propose to present a series of women authors, some of them well known already, but others practically unknown in our country. These women, intrepid and bold travelers, traveled to Spain from the centuries of Modernity until the Nineteenth century. These are six women writers whose literary production, in the most cases, has not been translated into Spanish. For this reason, we will try to show through the translation of some passages of her works, of the analysis of the literary production of each one of these six women, and of the scientific literature consulted what was the vision that these women writers had and offered from Spain through their scriptural production. This will allow us to get closer to her biographies, her literary and professional careers and her stories about Spain. In addition, we present them according to a chronological point of view, in order to examine more comfortably evolution over several centuries of this women’s travel writing.