Road writers: venturing to the far corners of South America, nineteen-century women trekkers left their mark in lively, widely read travelogues.

• Author: Buck, Daniel

To Elizabeth "Lizzie" Cabot Cary Agassiz, I an American woman far from her proper Boston home, the numbers of unattached young ladies at the guest house in the countryside near Manaus seemed unusual. She quizzed several of them and learned that she had overnighted at a brothel.

Lizzie was in Brazil with her husband, Swiss-born naturalist Louis Agassiz, on a scientific expedition to the Amazon--which involved nonstop fish collecting and the occasional brothel stay. The couple's account of the expedition, A Journey in Brazil (1867), is based on her journal and bears her literary stamp. It became a best-seller and a natural-history classic.

Literary travel is a small but much-appreciated planet in the universe of belles-lettres, and one where women like Lizzie made their mark. Women in the nineteenth century traveled for much the same reasons as men--to seek adventure, to prove themselves, to get out of the house. Some accompanied their husbands overseas on diplomatic or military posts. But for a select group of women--including Flora Tristan, Lady Florence Dixie, and Annie Smith Peck--travel was part of a larger force in their lives. All three were active feminists whose political and social ideas were distinctly avant-garde.

Whatever the motivations for their journeys, ladies have been on the road at least since, well, the Romans built roads. In The Blessings of a Good Skirt: Women Travellers and Their World, historian Mary Russell notes that by the early Middle Ages Anglo-Saxon noblemen were shipping their daughters off to France for a Christian education, and by the 1600s the era of the Grand Tour had arrived, allowing women, escorted and unescorted, to wander the great cities of Europe. Steamships began to displace sailing vessels in the early 1800s, making long voyages faster and safer. Equally important, steamers provided accommodations for women.

As literary travel came along in earnest in the 1800s, women wrote travelogues, which became popular at home. In her introduction to Telling Travels: Selected Writings by Nineteenth-Century American Women Abroad (1995), Mary Suzanne Schriber touched on an aspect of the genre that was appealing to women: "The travel book is commodious and informal, a discontinuous form of writing similar to the journal, the memoir, the letter, and the diary, all of which women have produced from the earliest times."

Since nineteenth-century literary travel was largely an Anglo-American phenomenon, most female travelogue writers, especially in South America, were either British or American. Travelogues met a consumer demand, which arose out of an industrializing, urbanizing society. That society was also breaking down gender restrictions, giving women the freedom to travel and to publish and creating consumers who bought the books. There was definitely a market because vicarious travelers, especially in the last century, far outnumbered the real McCoys. Travelogues, reports the Cambridge History of English Literature, have "been more read in Great Britain than any other books except novels." Today, perhaps, people will buy a travelogue about a place they are heading, but in the last century the reader was more likely to be home bound.

Owing perhaps to the greater distances, travel hardships, and language barriers, South America was not the destination of as many female literary travelers as other parts of the globe, but it was certainly not ignored. And accounts of their scientific expeditions to the continent by Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin in the first part of the nineteenth century excited the imagination of the reading public, undoubtedly influencing the writing, if not the destination, of some of the literary tourists

Humboldt's account of his 1799-1804 expedition influenced one of the nineteenth-century's earliest, and most noteworthy, travelers, English-woman Maria Dundas Graham. Her South American experiences resulted in two books: Journal of a Residence in Chile during the Year 1822, and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 182S (1824) and Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, and Residence There, during Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1828 (1824). Latin American historian Charles Griffin says Graham wrote "the best of the foreign visitors' accounts on Chile." The rare book market agrees. A recent catalogue offered a first edition, with aquatints of Graham's drawings, for $1,600.

Graham had first launched her writing career with an account of her life in India and...