2019/03/04 by Trish Bredar · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Travel Writing and Literature #Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes #Historical Economic and Social Studies
paper · doi:10.1080/10509585.2019.1582418
openalex publication_date 2019/03/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
Charlotte Smith composed her Elegiac Sonnets (1784–1797)—a text increasingly recognized as foundational to British Romanticism—at a time when the significations of pedestrian travel were shifting from negative connotations of vagrancy and destitution to more genteel associations with leisure and creativity. However, these new possibilities were largely limited to male travelers; women's walking was often severely curtailed and remained tainted by implications of immorality. Smith's fraught, often ambiguous portraits of wandering figures highlight this gender imbalance, simultaneously drawing attention to the restrictions on women's movements and carving out an imaginative space for women's mobility. This article locates Elegiac Sonnets within the history of pedestrianism and expands the critical conversation surrounding the collection's use of gender performance as social critique in order to argue that Smith's transgressive discourse of female mobility troubles the typically androcentric narrative of the Romantic peripatetic poet.