Two-thirds creative and one-third critical, my dissertation consisted of excerpts from a non-fiction travel memoir set in the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan called The Dragon Run and an accompanying commentary that examined the representation of the self in modern travel writing. My supervisors explained from the outset that a kind of dialogue should take place in my study, the creative project generating themes that invited critical inquiry and the critical work guiding me in my creative decisions.
 
A dominant theme that emerged in my creative project was self-revelation. I wished to communicate the thoughts and feelings of my travelling alter-ego – as he flustered, for instance, over getting a teaching contract and a work visa to go to Bhutan, struggled to understand the political developments afoot upon arrival, or reflected at length on Gross National Happiness and on contentment more generally. By studying recent works of travel, in which the writers were expressive of the personal, I was able to draw on some of the literary techniques they deployed (Jamie Zeppa’s use of dramatic monologue, for example, to display the trepidation of her younger self at the prospect of teaching overseas, Edward Abbey’s tonal shifts to express irritation over the threat to wilderness as a result of industrial tourism, or Peter Matthiessen’s lyricism to articulate a perceived merging of self with mountain in the Nepali Himalaya). My practice also led to the study of critical theories that examined self-revelation in life writing: the ways that “devices of fiction,” such as dramatic scenes and rising action, invigorate the progress of the wayfarer toward fuller understanding, or the potential of nature at her wildest to nurture larger awareness. Theory fed back into practice. I had to decide how I would distinguish (through reflective asides) my more seasoned travelling self from his newly arrived counterpart. How self-searching could I be in my reminiscences without appearing self-absorbed or guilty of glorifying wilderness for the sake of self-realisation?
 
Though the doctoral journey is now at an end, the creative/critical dialogue prevails as I prepare my memoir for publication with the University of Alberta Press in Canada. My critical reading continues to guide my practice. I might, my editor suggests, further develop the persona of my travelling self by bringing to the fore the other principal characters in my memoir. On our long run across the Kingdom, my wife, for instance, became “camp mum,” taking our Bhutanese student runners under her wing, making sure they ate well, did their assigned chores, and attended to their injuries, while remaining in high spirits. Through reporting on the way she treated them (and on the ways they responded) and expressing my feelings, I will inevitably say much about who I am (or who I was at the time of the trip). Irritated by the presence of smoke-belching quarry trucks on the road to the final mountain pass, my running self seeks imaginative escape by remembering a striking nature encounter. Is his memory of the golden langur in the forest - endowed through recollection with the power to soothe the beleaguered traveller - somewhat contrived, my editor wonders ... Am I guilty here of fetishizing nature?

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Italy - as we know it - did not exist. The peninsula was divided into separate dynasties, most of which were under Austrian rule. Dissatisfaction with these dynastic regimes galvanised a movement towards Italy’s Risorgimento (1815-1861) or  political resurgence, culminating in the Proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy as an independent nation state on 17 March 1861.

Despite the prevailing gender ideology that politics was beyond their proper sphere, British middle-class women were conspicuous in their advocacy for the Risorgimento. In fact, Pamela Gerrish Nunn argues that Victorian women’s discourses surrounding the Italian question provide an index of their shifting role and representation in British society in the decades leading up to the suffragist campaigns.

Travel writing is an apposite genre through which to examine the extent of this discursive engagement. The greater accessibility of the Continent made it easier for upper and middle-class women to travel, albeit under male protection. If purportedly journeying in pursuit of health or cultural enlightenment, Victorian women also enjoyed unprecedented political authority as eye-witnesses to the Risorgimento. Many female tourists brought material in their luggage to supply General Garibaldi and his army with their famed “red shirts”. Small wonder that customs officers ransacked tourists’ suitcases “as if […] a Mazzini would be found hidden in every carpet-bag”, as one traveller August Ludwig von Rochau complained. A few women travellers even acted as political messengers for the revolutionary exile. More frequently (and more legitimately), however, female tourists acted as emissaries for the Risorgimento through their travel accounts.

It was with the particular aim of raising money for the revolutionary exile Ferdinando Gatteschi that Mary Shelley published her travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy […] (1844). Significantly, however, Shelley did not discuss her revolutionary fundraising efforts with her publisher Edward Moxon. Instead, she pitched Rambles in conventionally feminine terms as “light” and “amusing”, avoiding mention of politics. Although often transgressed in actuality, the Victorian middle-class gender ideology of separate spheres nonetheless affected the critical reception of women’s travel writing, impacting on women's political engagement in print.

The etymology of the word Risorgimento, which means a resurgence, rebirth or resurrection, lent itself well to feminine mythologies of the movement. The allegorical representation of Italy as Italia – a woman in chains – further accommodated proto-feminist interpretations of Italian nationalism. One book in particular, Madame de Staël’s Corinne, ou Italie (1807), solidified the imaginative association of Italy with a woman’s country, as a space where women could (paradoxically) enjoy greater freedoms than at home. A bestseller into the 1870s, Corinne offered a flattering model for later women travel writers to adapt by imagining Italy as the home of female creative genius. Declared “[T]he image of our beautiful Italy”, the eponymous heroine also provided a modern allegory for Italy’s political situation, imbricating the woman question with the Italian question.

Women travel writers typically approached the Italian question through domestic discourses. Some – like Shelley – emphasised women’s role in the rebirth of the young nation as civic mothers. This strategy was also used by Mazzini to rally Englishwomen in support of the cause. Others, such as Florence Nightingale, framed their political inquiries as spiritual pilgrimages with Italy’s moral regeneration or resurrection at the bourn. However, as the Risorgimento took a violent turn with the 1848 revolutions, it became more difficult to accommodate Italian politics to conventionally feminine discourses. Accordingly, the didactic travel writer Selina Bunbury asserted her literary authority against Italian revolutionism. Others like Margaret Dunbar grew strangely quiet about the Italian question, focussing instead on a picturesque Italy, sanitized of revolutionary violence.

The relationship between the campaign for female suffrage and Italian independence was therefore much more complicated than the Corinne myth might suggest. Victorian women’s Italianate travel writing may provide an index of their changing role in British society. However, it also evidences women writers’ strategic engagement with the Risorgimento according to its shifting political capital in Britain. Rather than propelling a mutually reinforcing, proto-feminist narrative of women’s liberal engagement with the Risorgimento, Victorian women's travel accounts more often reveal these two campaigns as competing sites of authority.