SOURCE: Coleman, Deirdre. Introduction to Maiden Voyages and Infant Colonies: Two Women's Travel Narratives of the 1790's, pp. 1-43. London: Leicester University Press, 1999.

In the following excerpt, Coleman discusses two late eighteenth-century travel narratives written by British women, Anna Maria Falconbridge's Two Voyages to Sierra Leone and Mary Ann Parker's A Voyage Round the World.

Anna Maria Falconbridge, Two Voyages to Sierra Leone

for the Authoress is open to conviction, and if convicted on this occasion, she will with all due deference kiss the rod of correction.

As her narrative makes plain, Anna Maria Falconbridge had no intention whatsoever of venting her rage by kissing the rod which had punished her. Indeed, the image of such a double chastisement, dealt out by patriarchal authority to children and other subordinates, is ironically positioned at the opening of a text in which the author's ‘infant pen’ rises up rebelliously against...