Women travel writers and the question of veracity

Abstract

Travel writing inevitably raises questions of blurred genres, of how much of what is described in a travel text is fiction, non-fiction, or autobiography, and what the reader can expect from the writer in terms of self-disclosure and truth telling. Debbie Lisle argues, 'travel writing is a form of global politics because it reproduces the same discourses of difference that hold our prevailing understandings of the world in place'. Travellers in earlier times tended to be members of the upper class, or sponsored by the Royal Geographic Society (RGS) which meant it was hard for most women to go far, which makes it more difficult for readers with a sense of history not to be indulgent to modern women who have to get their funding where they can and accept the compromises this implies. Truth, when considered in relation to women's travel writing, is as complex as the genre itself.