For nineteenth-century women travel writers, the solitary narrative stance was rhetorically empowering, yet also problematic. When examining women who approached their travel as a vocation and source of income, the reasons for this rhetorical choice become evident. Presenting oneself as traveling alone, that is, without a European male, allowed women an unusual opportunity to establish a voice of authority and move outside the limits of the domestic sphere. It also, however, required that travelers write against conventional expectations for women's writing. Thus, careful rhetorical negotiations were required for women writers to maintain both control of their own voyage and conventional acceptability in a culture which suspected unaccompanied women.
When Mary Wollstonecraft encountered the image of the solitary traveler in Rousseau's late work, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, she embraced it, developing the term in her correspondence to describe her own feelings of alienation and despair. While in her Letters From a Short Residence in Sweden (1796), she did acknowledge traveling with her child and a nursemaid, she kept the narrative focus on herself, hid the identity of her correspondent and the purpose of her travel, and, as a result, was briefly able to establish sympathy for her situation and respect for her powers of observation (until William Godwin's biographical sketch drastically altered how it was read).
Later on, Harriet Martineau chose the solitary narrative stance in her Retrospect of Western Travel (1838) when she wished to establish herself in early sociological investigations. She, however, could not acknowledge any direct literary debt to Wollstonecraft. In her autobiography, she nervously distanced herself from Wollstonecraft and in her life was careful to avoid any hint of personal scandal. Partially because of her careful guarding of her personal reputation, she was able to parlay her travel account into a very unusually well respected intellectual position in her lifetime.
This rhetorical stance, however, became more difficult to sustain in the later half of the nineteenth century as seen in the writings of Isabella Bird (Bishop) and Mary Kingsley. In these texts, issues of dress now have to be directly addressed to assure a more conservative reading public that femininity is maintained and to avoid the charge of being a "New Woman"--part of a general social retreat from earlier progressive movements (esp. in the 1890s). When the narrator is placed in unchaperoned situations, as was Bird when she was trapped with some young men in the mountains in A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879), the focus is shifted to safer domestic concerns. Additionally, dangerous situations must be downplayed so the women show themselves to be in control of the situation, although they are absent the requisite male. Bird often indicates that difficulties and accidents are due to others' poor judgment, while Kingsley in Travels in West Africa (1897), takes responsibility humorously for her falls and upsets, destabilizing readers' expectations and making her positions of danger more acceptable. Scenes usually associated with explorer/hunter activities, and inherently dangerous, are described by Kingsley with domestic images, thus advancing the argument that a lady can remain a lady even when unchaperoned and out of sight of social enforcers.
Despite the admirably careful balancing acts these writers performed, however, by Kingsley's time in the 1890s, the tension is apparent and the positions which had to be held were ultimately too contradictory to maintain.
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