Travel within Iberia was still a potentially dangerous activity in the years after the Peninsula War (1808-14) and most accounts of the time come from men who were there in a military capacity. Romantic poets and scholars helped to promote the idea of Spain and Portugal as heroic countries for their rebellion against the tyranny of Napoleonic France.
The years between the end of the war and the coming of the railways saw a high point of Iberian travel writing which has never been equalled. The texts in this edition form a lively collection of first-hand accounts by women travellers from this era. All three authors share an (at best) ambivalent attitude towards the country they are visiting, from whose native charms they are shielded by an army of servants, a fervent Protestantism and, in the case of Mrs Ellis, by the Pyrenees. Nonetheless, their narratives contain much information on the appearance, customs and environment of the Spanish and Portuguese at a time of social and political upheaval.
Texts are reproduced in facsimile with full scholarly apparatus. New editorial material includes a general introduction, headnotes to each text and explanatory endnotes
Volumes 1 & 2
Marianne Baillie, Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822, and 1823 (1824)
Volumes 3 & 4
Lady Henrietta Chatterton, The Pyrenees with Excursions into Spain (1843)
Volume 5
Sarah Ellis, Summer and Winter in the Pyrenees ([1841])
