Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: European Women Pilgrims retraces the steps of five intrepid “lady travelers” who ventured into the geography of the New World—Mexico, the Southern Cone, Brazil, and the Caribbean—at a crucial historical juncture, the period of political anarchy following the break from Spain and the rise of modernity at the turn of the twentieth century. Traveling as historians, social critics, ethnographers, and artists, Frances Erskine Inglis (1806–82), Maria Graham (1785–1842), Flora Tristan (1803–44), Fredrika Bremer (1801–65), and Adela Breton (1849–1923) reshaped the map of nineteenth-century Latin America. Organized by themes rather than by individual authors, this book examines European women’s travels as a spectrum of narrative discourses, ranging from natural history, history, and ethnography. Women’s social condition becomes a focal point of their travels. By combining diverse genres and perspectives, women’s travel writing ushers a new vision of post-independence societies. The trope of pilgrimage conditions the female travel experience, which suggests both the meta-end of the journey as well as the broader cultural frame shaping their individual itineraries.

At the dawn of a reimagined 20th century, one girl must become the reluctant symbol of a new world. The year is 1908. Seventeen-year-old Rosalind Wallace’s blissful stay in England with her best friend, Cecily de Vere, ends abruptly when her father books Rosalind on the maiden voyage of his fabulous Transatlantic Express, the world’s first railroad to travel under the sea. Rosalind is furious. But lucky for her, Cecily and her handsome older brother, Charles, volunteer to accompany her home. But when Charles disappears and Cecily and her housemaid, Doris, are found stabbed to death in their state room, Rosalind finds herself trapped undersea, in a deadly fight to clear herself of her friend’s murder and to thwart a sinister enemy.

Highlights the social and textual complexity of the transatlantic world for American women writers

Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.