| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Susan Clair Imbarrato. Traveling Women: Narrative Visions of Early America. Athens: Ohio University Press. 2006. Pp. xiii, 254. $42.95.

This is a book confirming that women who were geographically mobile in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century North America were also diligent writers. The book's main contention is that travelogues written by women offer new knowledge regarding the traveling experience and its literary construction. This argument—like the book's overall narrative—is informed by a traditional feminist idiom. Statements such as "Determined and adventurous, women played a key role in culture building and were quite simply integral to the settling of early America and the New Republic" (p. 2) set the agenda for the book's archival selections as well as its interpretive framework. Of the fifty extant travel narratives for the period between 1704 and 1830, the book examines about half, supplementing the difference by looking at selected collections of personal letters. In five chapters, Susan Clair Imbarrato addresses a variety of literary forms that are associated with travel writing (the journal, the diary, the letter, the epistolary novel). The book's overarching concern is with the way in which women's travel writings emerged within travel-specific contexts. In the course of examining this nexus between text and context, Imbarrato addresses rituals of hospitality, class barriers, the mail system, and above all a variety of settings (public/private houses, coaches, roads).

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