Women's Travel Writings in North Africa and the Middle East

Part II: In 1821, Catherine Hutton published The Tour of Africa, a three-volume work covering the entire continent. Although the book is framed as a first-person narrative and told in the voice of ‘the son of an English country gentleman of good family’, it is in fact a compilation of existing travel accounts, including those of Pococke, Bruce, Denon, Barrow and Sonnini. Extracts from these accounts are woven together without attribution, creating a text which is both factual and fictional. A more complex text, therefore, than it initially appears, Hutton’s Tour raises challenging questions about intertextuality in nineteenth-century women’s travel writing.