This volume complements other published works about travel by nineteenth-century women writers by locating and creating ‘space’ for Japan which is missing within recent critical discourses on travel writing. It examines the narratives of women writers who travelled to Japan from the mid-1850s onwards, when Japan was first opened to the West, and became a highly desirable travel destination for decades thereafter. Many women travelled in this period, and although most left no record of their journeys, enough did to form a discrete body of literature spanning more than fifty years – from the end of the feudal Tokugawa era to the rise of Meiji Japan as a world power. Their narratives about Japan occupy a culturally significant place, not only in the genre of Victorian female travel writing, but in Victorian travel writing per se. The writers who are the subject of this book are divided into two groups: those who were ‘travellers-by-intent’, namely, Anna D’A, Alice Frere, Annie Brassey, Isabella Bird and Marie Stopes, and those who ‘travelled-by-default’ as the wives of diplomats, namely Mrs Pemberton Hodgson, Mrs Hugh Fraser and Baroness Albert d’Anethan.

A truly remarkable person, Caroline Macdonald (1874-1931) was a Canadian woman who spent almost her entire working life in Japan and who played a significant role there in both the establishment of the YWCA and in prison reform. A native of Wingham, Ontario, she was one of the first women to attend the University of Toronto, where in 1901 she graduated with honours in mathematics and physics. But rather than follow an academic career, she opted in 1904, through her connections with the Presbyterian Church and the YWCA in Canada and the United States, to move to Tokyo to work as a lay missionary and social worker. During the 1920s, she was the best-known foreign woman in Tokyo. In A Heart at Leisure from Itself Margaret Prang follows Caroline Macdonald's life and career, focusing on her work in Japan on behalf of incarcerated criminals. Working mostly with male prisoners and their families, Macdonald became an international interpreter of the movement for prison reform work for which she is still warmly remembered in Japan. She regarded herself as a missionary but was also highly critical of much missionary endeavour, her own work being more in the practical than spiritual realm. Her death in 1931 elicited tributes from all over the world, particularly from Japan. Perhaps the most fitting came from Arima Shirosuke, the prison governor with whom Macdonald worked most closely. Reflecting on her life, Arima observed that he thought it was her absolute conviction that every human being was a child of God and her 'effortless' practice of that faith that placed Macdonald 'beyond every prejudice' of religion, race, or class. She was, he said, 'a heart at leisure from itself.' This book throws light on Japanese-Canadian relations in the first few decades of this century. Macdonald's career reveals the cross-cultural influence of the YWCA in Japan, the role of the Protestant churches there, and the evolution of prison reform in Japan and the people involved in it.

Victorian Women's Travel Writing on Meiji Japan narrates forgotten stories of cross-cultural friendship and love between Victorian female travellers and Meiji Japanese between 1853 and 1912.

This volume examines the Meiji Restoration through a global history lens to re-interpret the formation of a globally-cast, Japanese nation-state.

Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan focuses on women’s activities in the new public spaces of Meiji Japan. With chapters on public, private, and missionary schools for girls, their students, and teachers, on social and political groups women created, on female employment, and on women’s participation in print media, this book offers a new perspective on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japanese history. Women’s founding of and participation in conflicting discourses over the value of women in Meiji public life demonstrate that during this period active and vocal women were everywhere, that they did not meekly submit to the dictates of the government and intellectuals over what women could or should do, and that they were fully integrated in the production of Meiji culture. Mara Patessio shows that the study of women is fundamental not only in order to understand fully the transformations of the Meiji period, but also to understand how later generations of women could successfully move the battle forward. Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan is essential reading for all students and teachers of 19th- and early 20th-century Japanese history and is of interest to scholars of women’s history more generally.