In Victorian Women Travel Writers in Africa (1982) Catherine Barnes Stevenson classifies her subjects as wives, missionaries, and vacationers. Her classifications, of course, apply not only to women travel writers in Africa. Victorian women who chronicled their travels in foreign countries, whether in Africa, America, or Asia, were almost always military wives, missionaries, or amateur travelers. Marianne Postans was no exception. As a military wife in India, she began her eighteen-year literary career (from 1839 to 1857) writing about the province of Cutch. After she had remarried, she became a vacationer and traveled in search of other, more exotic locations for her books. By the end of her career she had returned to England, where she wrote about her native country but also continued to write about India from memory. Her body of work, rich in variety and occasionally innovative in form, not only reflects her transformation from a literate military...