Women experience and portray travel differently: Gender matters - irreducibly and complexly. Building on recent scholarship in women's travel writing, these provocative essays not only affirm the impact of gender, but also cast women's journeys against coordinates such as race, class, culture, religion, economics, politics, and history. The book's scope is unique: Women travelers extend in time from Victorian memsahibs to contemporary « road girls, and topics range from Anna Leon-Owens's slanted portrayal of Siam - later popularized in the movie, The King and I, to current feminist « descripting of the male-road-buddy genre. The extensive array of writers examined includes Nancy Prince, Frances Trollope, Cameron Tuttle, Lady Mary Montagu, Catherine Oddie, Kate Karko, Frances Calderon de la Barca, Rosamond Lawrence, Zilpha Elaw, Alexandra David-Neel, Amelia Edwards, Erica Lopez, Paule Marshall, Bharati Mukherjee, and Marilynne Robinson.