SOURCE: Watt, Helga Schutte. “Woman's Progress: Sophie La Roche's Travelogues 1787-1788.” The Germanic Review 69, no. 2 (spring 1994): 50-60.

In the following essay, Watt highlights the manner in which La Roche's travelogues assert the traditional role of women and provide information about women's professional and artistic accomplishments.

Sophie La Roche (1730-1807) was the first well-known German woman to publish travelogues. There were illustrious French and English predecessors, most notably Lady Mary Wortley Montagu whose Turkish Embassy Letters (1763) are justly celebrated to this day. In the eighteenth century, travel literature was enjoying its golden age, but travelogues by women were still conspicuous. Women not only brought a different perspective to the experience and description of foreign lands, but the very act of traveling and writing became a significant aspect of their progress toward emancipation.¹ Sophie La Roche knew Lady Mary's letters well; she devoted sixteen pages in her journal Pomona f...