Victorian women discovering and representing India in their travel journals

In the nineteenth century, Britain experienced rapid technological expansion, improved transportation, growing urbanization and social development. Such a context encouraged upper and middle class British women to travel and challenge social taboos by traversing and discovering the Indian subcontinent. Many described their experiences in their travel journals which often became bestsellers, since they narrated activities these women would not have been likely to participate in while in England. Women’s travel writing has mostly been investigated from a cultural angle or by focusing on their colonial discourse, imperial identity or proto-feminism. There is instead a paucity of corpus linguistic and discourse analyses of their writings. This paper extends the literature by adopting a corpus-driven approach integrated with discourse analysis in investigating how women travellers used recurring patterns of words and structures contributing to construe meaning in their texts. The findings indicate how the collocational patterns around the keywords highlight Victorian women’s evaluations whilst representing India in their travel journals.