Ladies Of The Grand Tour

"According to the 1747 publication The Art of Governing a Wife, women in Georgian England were to "lay up and save, look to the house, talk to few and take of all within." However, some women broke from these directives and took up the distinctly male privilege of traveling to the Continent to develop mind, spirit, and body. For many the Grand Tour -- often undertaken in great parades of coaches laden with servants, trunks, and furniture -- became an intellectual and romantic rite of passage. The landscape, health spas, salons, and social scene of Enlightenment Europe provided a wealth of glamorous, revolutionary, and therapeutic experiences from which many ladies returned "the best informed and most perfect creatures." Brian Dolan leads us into the hearts and minds of the ladies through their stories, thoughts, and court gossip, recorded in journals, letters, and diaries. Ladies of the Grand Tour creates a mesmerizing portrait of a previously overlooked slice of eighteenth-century life."

The legacy of ancient Greece and Rome has been imitated, resisted, misunderstood, and reworked by every culture that followed. In this volume, some five hundred articles by a wide range of scholars investigate the afterlife of this rich heritage in the fields of literature, philosophy, art, architecture, history, politics, religion, and science.

In 1819, the Murray family set out on one of the last Grand Tours before railways forever changed the way people travelled. The eldest daughter of the Second Earl of Mansfield, Lady Frederica Murray (later Stanhope, as she married James Hamilton Stanhope, the youngest son of the 3rd Earl of Stanhope) kept a diary on the tour, which this book explores in detail. The diary has never been published (not even mentioned in any of the Grand Tour literature) and is a fascinating and essential look at the Murray/Mansfield family, and Europe at the time. Frederica was a deeply observant traveller and noted down numerous picturesque and historical details; she was also very open and sometimes even cutting in her opinions when she came across something or someone she did not like. Frederica’s diary shows a very mature 19-year-old with clear opinions on art, literature and the world around her. This book will therefore be interesting for scholars of travel, Grand Tours, and Regency England and its society, as well as anyone with an interest in travel and history.

Language is still a relatively under-researched aspect of the Grand Tour. This book offers a comprehensive introduction enriched by the amusing stories and vivid quotations collected from travellers' writings, providing crucial insights into the rise of modern vernaculars and the standardisation of European languages.

Offers a compelling story of mercantile wealth and merchant heiresses who asserted their rights despite loss, imprisonment, and murder.

A fascinating study of how British travellers experienced, described and represented the cities they visited on the Grand Tour.

A history of American women challenging domesticity by touring Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The nineteenth-century ideal of domesticity identified home as women’s proper sphere, but the ideal was frequently challenged, profoundly so when woman left home and country to travel in foreign lands. This book explores the reasons for and ramifications of women making a Grand Tour, a trip to Europe, between 1814 and 1914; this century between major European wars witnessed the golden age of American Grand Tours. Men and women alike were inspired by a Euro-centric education that valued the Old World as the fountainhead of their civilization. Reaching Europe necessitated an Ocean crossing, a disorienting time taking women far from domestic comfort. Once abroad, American women had to juggle accustomed norms of behavior with the demands of travel and customs of foreign lands. Wearing proper attire, even when hiking in the Alps, coping with unfamiliar languages, grappling with ever-changing rules about customs and passports, traveling alone—these were just some of the challenges women faced when traveling. Some traveled with their husband, others with female relatives and friends and a few entirely alone. Traveling companions had to agree on where to stay, when and where to dine, how to travel, and where to go. The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 made clear that even in the twentieth century, a Grand Tour involved risk. Because more women survived then men, some insisted that the Titanic’s example should curb female independence. However, a growing number of women continued making a Grand Tour for the next two year. It was the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 that temporarily brought an end to a century of female Grand Tours. “Beatty’s ability to weave the experiences of hundreds of American women on the Grand Tour in Europe into a consistent narrative is per se a remarkable feat. But the author does much more than that. She uses the “journey” as trope to represent the long and difficult process of women’s emancipation, in its several cultural, psychological, social, and political dimensions.” —Susanna Delfino, Professor of American History, retired. University of Genoa, Italy

Through both longer essays and shorter case studies, this book examines the relationship of European women from various countries and backgrounds to collecting, in order to explore the social practices and material and visual cultures of collecting in eighteenth-century Europe. It recovers their lives and examines their interests, their methodologies, and their collections and objects—some of which have rarely been studied before. The book also considers women’s role as producers, that is, creators of objects that were collected. Detailed examination of the artefacts—both visually, and in relation to their historical contexts—exposes new ways of thinking about collecting in relation to the arts and sciences in eighteenth-century Europe. The book is interdisciplinary in its makeup and brings together scholars from a wide range of fields. It will be of interest to those working in art history, material and visual culture, history of collecting, history of science, literary studies, women’s studies, gender studies, and art conservation.