Reviews

'Focusing on close readings of four texts by women writers, she develops overarching theories on the radically different experience that wandering - conceived as aimless rather than purposeful travel - represents for a woman as opposed to a man, and how that translates into unnerving difficulties “on the level of thought process, of interaction, of syntax, and of narrative, as well as of literal movement in the world”.'

Annette Kobak, The Times Literary Supplement

'For a book about alienation, exile, loss, and failure, Ingrid Horrocks’s Women Wanderers is a joy to read.’

Andrew McInnes, Eighteenth Century Fiction

'Horrocks’ carefully-researched and illuminating study establishes Romantic-era women writers as significant contributors to debates over social sympathy that continue to resonate at a moment when war and weather cast ever more people from their homes.'

Judith Pascoe, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation

'Horrocks brilliantly constructs a model for examining women’s travel writing in the more restrictive domain of mobility, one that contains both the yearning for a larger expressive canvas and the gendered anxieties and their displacements that such yearning provokes.'

Elizabeth Fay, Studies in Romanticism

'Depictions of reluctant women wanderers in women’s texts highlight the social reasons for homelessness, the psychological and material costs of wandering, and the non-traditional narrative structures necessary to give voice to these stories. Horrocks proposes 'wandering' as cross-genre term that embraces the open-ended and digressive aspects of the travel narrative. Her deft analysis of form … responds to the question, 'what might monotony, repetition, a failure to move forward, a wandering rather than developing narrative structure, be able to express?' … Horrocks brilliantly reads form at the levels of genre, narrative structure, and sentence.'

Elizabeth A. Dolan, European Romantic Review

'This interdisciplinary, cross-genre study clarifies the general features of wandering as well as the fine differences between wanderers, offering an insightful view of not only male Romanticists’ wanderlust but also women writers’ ‘wanderlost’ - lost in their painfully perpetual movement.'

Sijie Wang, Review Journal for the Study of Culture

'Where many studies have construed travel and mobility as inherently liberating activities, Horrocks focuses instead on the depiction - in Romantic-era poetry, fiction and travel writing - of a variety of reluctant, sometimes coerced women travellers, for whom mobility represents not freedom and empowerment but dislocation and powerlessness. … In their hands, Horrocks argues persuasively, this motif not only becomes more harrowing but is also the vehicle for much more resonant and far-reaching critiques of social injustice, gender relations and modernity. This is a highly original topic, and one which Horrocks pursues with an exemplary blend of theoretical sophistication and sensitive, always illuminating close reading.'

Carl Thompson, Studies in Travel Writing