Frances Elliot and Italy. Writing travel, writing the self

Frances Elliot was a British Victorian writer and traveller. She spent most of her life in Italy to which she dedicated much of her work: travelogues, social histories and various critical articles. This book identifies and critically analyses the strategies that she uses in her texts to construct an image of the Italian peninsula for her British contemporaries. Elliot’s representations of the Mediterranean country, which she explored from North to South, from the Alps to Sicily, were deeply ambivalent, and were seen through the prism of her experiences as a woman in patriarchal Victorian England. This volume explores how, for Elliot, Italy became a space of ‘otherness’ with a disturbing but also enriching and empowering potential. Ultimately, it provides an insightful examination of the extent to which Italy opens up a space in which Elliot managed to find her own voice as a woman and as a writer.