Novelist, painter, and inveterate traveler, Louisa Stuart Costello was an enormously popular writer in the 1830s and 1840s. She not only wrote five travel narratives but also edited and collected many volumes of poetry and memoirs. Moreover, she worked as a reviewer and critic for the Athenaeum and regularly contributed short travel essays to Bentley's Miscellany, a popular Victorian periodical. Although her work has been largely neglected, Costello's narratives are colored with class, race, and gender considerations as well as a strong nationalist bias, and such competing impulses produce a narrative tension that makes her work relevant to readers interested in colonialism, postcolonialism, and travel literature.

Costello joined the ranks of many other British women who during the nineteenth century created their own grand tour experience. Equipped with published travel books and guides, these women discovered the Continent for themselves. Many wrote travel accounts but undermined their works...