Julia Ward Howe, reformer, poet, lecturer, and woman's right's advocate, was among the growing number of nineteenth-century American women who published their travel writings. Known among friends and acquaintances for her vibrant, witty, and outspoken personality, Howe perhaps best displayed her energetic and authoritative voice in her books of travel, which take the form of letters, journals, and memoirs.

Born in New York City, the fourth child of Samuel Ward, a successful New York banker, and Julia Cutler Ward, who died four years later, Howe was educated privately. Self-disciplined and intellectually ambitious even as a child, she read widely in the Bible, history, and the classics; mastered German, French, and Italian; and published poetry by age fourteen. In 1843 she married Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, nicknamed "Chev," a philanthropist, decorated hero in the Greek War of Independence that had begun in 1821, and director of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts...