Travel, gender, and imperialism : Mary Kingsley and West Africa

Drawing from the life and travels of Mary Kingsley, a nineteenth century travel writer and critic of the Crown Colony system, Alison Blunt cogently examines the relationships among travel, gender and imperialism. Instead of studying either travel generally or women travel writers in the colonial period specifically, Blunt examines both to show how the spatiality and gendering of travel are inseperable. Underlying her examination are debates about women as a focus of historial research, Western women and imperalism, and the place of women in a historiography of geography.