Anka Ryall

Europe's Northern Periphery and the Future of Women in the Travel Narratives of Ethel Tweedie

Among the writers who defined the European northern periphery for British readers towards the end of the nineteenth century, Ethel Brilliana (Mrs Alec) Tweedie was a significant figure. In addition to numerous articles about various aspects of Fenno-Scandinavian culture, she published three book-length narratives based on her northern journeys, A Girls Ride in Iceland (1889), A Winter Jaunt to Norway (1894), and Through Finland in Carts (1897). Though almost forgotten today, these books were widely read at the time, and Tweedie came to be regarded as an authority on the north. What makes Tweedies Nordic travel narratives unique and of interest today is their conflation of discourses of northernness and female emancipation. This article outlines two different and apparently contradictory representations of the European north in Tweedies travel narratives of the 1890s. On the one hand, they primitivize Fenno-Scandinavia by emphasizing the arctic climate and the areas distance both culturally and geographically from metropolitan European centres. On the other hand, Tweedies Nordic travel narratives give the peripheral countries of Fenno-Scandinavia a symbolic centrality in the development of Europe. In some respects, particularly womens participation in social life, the northern nations are represented as models of progress. My focus is on Tweedies final and most ambitious Nordic travel narrative, Through Finland in Carts, which equates northernness with modernity and the future of women. Compared to this exemplary north it is Britain that lags behind, and the contrast implies a fundamental critique of British culture at the fin de siècle. Finally, I trace the personal circumstances informing Tweedies interest in Finnish women and discuss why they are deliberately concealed in the text itself.

The Arctic Playground of Europe: Sir Martin Conway's Svalbard

The development of tourism is a significant aspect of the processes of modernity in the High Arctic. This article discusses the British art historian and mountaineer Sir William Martin Conways two travelogues, The First Crossing of Spitsbergen (1897) and With Ski and Sledge over Arctic Glaciers (1898) , in terms of a pioneering tourist approach to the archipelago of Svalbard. Unlike earlier yachting tourists, Conway described a journey into the uncharted interior of the main island, Spitsbergen. His books are therefore narrated as exploration accounts and following many of the demands of that genre, such as an emphasis on mapping, natural science and being the first. However, they may also be read as guidebooks for other discerning and undaunted British gentleman travellers. Inspired by the art critic John Ruskin’s “science of aspects”, which combined accurate scientific observations and practical knowledge with an imaginative and aesthetic response to the landscape, Conway attempts to give his readers a positive sense of the qualities of the Arctic. At the same time, he promotes Svalbard as an Arctic “Playground of Europe”, where adventurous Alpinists in addition to climbing unknown mountains and glaciers could find fraternal domesticity far away from home around the hearth of the campfire. In this way Conway locates natural beauty, life and recreational opportunities where travellers before him had only described desolation and death.

Woolfian border poetics and contemporary circadian novels

Virginia Woolf’s circadian novel Mrs Dalloway (1925) has inspired many successors, some of them important works in their own right. Although few of these novels are as explicitly linked to Mrs Dalloway as Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998), more recent novels such as Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) and Gail Jones’ Five Bells (2011) clearly pay homage to Woolf’s use of the one-day format to reveal whole lives and show how those individual private lives are entangled in history. The essay highlights one particular aspect of these three works, their imaginative and often transformative reworking of elements of Woolfian border poetics, particularly the predominance in Mrs Dalloway of boundary tropes – windows, doors, thresholds – that create a sense of synchronicity between present and past. Adapting Woolf’s boundary tropes to representations of contemporary realities, all three novels in different ways suggest how the present is deepened ”when backed by the past”, as Woolf puts it her memoirs; that is, when the present is not only informed by a remembered past but experienced in terms of both re-enactment and renewal, continuity and change.