Marianne Baillie’s View of Portugal or British Femaleness Abroad

Several critics have argued that nineteenth-century British women travellers were quite different from their male counterparts. Not only were they different from those women who stayed at home, but they also used the journey to describe their relationships with the Other/the foreigner in a way that did not occur in male travel writing. Thus women were allegedly more conscious of their own and the native's foreignness or strangeness and therefore more prone to avoid preconceived views about the Other. This paper analyses Marianne Baillie's travel narrative, Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822, and 1823, and envisions evaluating whether the generalization regarding women travellers is confirmed or denied in Bail lie's personal account of her stay in Portugal.