SOURCE: “Victorian Women, Wisdom, and Southeast Asia,” in Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse: Renegotiating Gender and Power, edited by Thaïs E. Morgan, Rutgers University Press, 1990, pp. 207-24.

In the following excerpt, Morgan presents an overview of Victorian women's writings about their travels to the Orient and suggests that, like Victorian men's criticism and scientific writings, they “lay claim to a wisdom that bases its truth on the extent to which it has emerged as lived experience.”

I am content to sympathize with common mortals, no matter where they live; in houses or in tents, in the streets under a fog, or in the forests behind the dark line of distant mangroves that fringe the vast solitude of the sea.

—Joseph Conrad, “Preface” to Almayer's Folly

Then he asked me in a solemn voice: “You know Stambul, Monsieur?”

“Yes.”

“I lived in Stambul a year, and I tell...