About travel writing…
This summer, I visited Greenway, a quiet 1950s house set in Devon, amidst a luxuriant woodland flowing down a hillside to the Dart estuary. I’d been there a year before, coming out of the COVID lockdown. A pilgrimage of sort since Greenway, before becoming a National Trust property, was the home of Agatha Christie and her family. The house is filled with her presence in the form of first editions of her novels, archeological artefacts from the Middle East, where she accompanied her husband Max Mallowan on his archeological excavations. More symbolically, her typewriter.
A pilgrimage because Christie was my grandmother’s favourite author and I grew up reading her novels - in French - buried under my bedcovers with a flashlight. Agatha Christie is widely recognised as a mystery writer, yet that isn’t the aspect of her writing that most fascinated me as a child. Instead, it was her ability to transport me to places which were distant, yet familiar. Familiar because three generations of my family had lived abroad, in East-Asia and North Africa . My head was full of their stories of travel, illustrated by the multitude of exotic mementos which populated our house and which Christie brought to life in her writing. Distant because a lot of her novels are set in the former British Empire, a time when women mostly travelled as companions. One might say that it makes her writing dated. Yet it was as if through her novels she claimed herself as travel writer, transporting eight-year-old me to foreign lands, as only writing can do.
What was important to me was that she was a woman, even though I could not have articulated it at the time. A role model before I knew the term. Someone who presented an alternative route into travel writing. All other stories of travel I read where by men authors. Flaubert. Chateaubriand. Balsac. Instinctively, I recognised Edward Said’s argument. That travel writing in the 19th and early 20th century was entirely defined by white men, and that the journeys they wrote about fuelled a toxic hierarchical narrative of the world. It says something of the power of storytelling.
I’d like to think women who wrote about travel presented an alternative view. Problem is, few women travelled, and even fewer who wrote about it were published. Now that anglophone publishers have woken to the need to bring greater diversity, a number of travel writing anthologies by women have surfaced. There is Wanderers: A History of Women Walking by Kerri Andrews, Writing Wild by Kathryn Aalto, and the more comprehensive The Virago Book of Women Travellers edited by Mary Morris. All of them present a similar list of voices from Mary Wollstonecraft to Dorothy Wordsworth, Vita Sackville-West to Joan Didion and Annie Dillard. In their preface, all of them apologise for the lack of diverse representation, arguing that other women voices are simply missing.
My interest in women travel writing crystallised when I migrated to the UK some two decades ago. First because travel literature written by men had provided me with a certain vision of travel that was not met by experience, but also because the act of writing about my own journey helped somehow articulate who I had become, now that I no longer lived on French soil. I wrote less about space than about the emotional response to that space. My writing aimed neither to classify, nor to depict another culture, but rather to unpick my own subjective responses. In this, I inscribed myself in what I feel is a New Travel Writing. One that doesn’t place restrictions on migrant as authors of travel narratives, that doesn’t limit migration to a narrative of displacement and othering, but which opens travel writing as a space for internal reflection about the self and the state of the world. For me, one recent example of this sort of literature includes Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova where a Bulgarian national living in Scotland travels the border between Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece to trace the spacial and psychological borders that intersect there after decades of conflicts. Another is Free to Go by Dr Esa Aldegheri, an Italo-Scottish author and migration studies expert, who wrote of her journey across Europe and Asia to Australia on a motorbike and how this contrasted for her with the experience of isolation during the pandemic. Hers is a reflection on what connects us and on the constraints that limit travel for women today. Movement is at the heart of writing and there are also many female authors writing fiction in which travel fplays a symbolic role. Wilderness by Bev Jones is such a novel. Beyond the thriller is a reflection on the place of trust in modern relationships, played out by a betrayed woman travelling to the American National Parks with the intention of murdering her cheating husband.
In my upcoming novel, Assimilation, I will be exploring the evolution of our relationship to travel, through three generations of women from the same family. Inspired by my own family, the story questions our understanding of what constitutes travel writing, why, and whether it is time to broaden the definition.