In this chapter I take as my starting point that all literature of travel operates between notions of ‘here’ and ‘there’ and the audience for such writing may sometimes be in both places at the same time, just as the writer too may shift positions in significant ways. The four women that I deal with - Janet Schaw, Lady Anne Lindsay Barnard, Anne Grant of Laggan and Frances Wright - could all be discussed under different headings, but they all at some point in their lives fill my category of ‘here’ and ‘there’ writers. They can also be used to show the transition from eighteenth-entury pragmatism (sometimes even callousness) in Janet Schaw through the humanised enlightenment attitudes of Anne Barnard to the romantic idealism of Anne Grant, albeit controlled by her stem evangelicalism, and finally to the post-French Revolution commitment to love and liberty that informs the work of Frances Wright.

Janet Schaw (?1737-?1801)

Janet Schaw's Journal of a Lady of Quality written probably between 1774 and 1776 during her journeys from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina and Portugal, was not published until 1921 after it had been serendipitously discovered in the course of a search for other material. This accident of female authorial visibility is made yet more ironic by what is signalled by the volume's frontispiece, for opposite the title page proclaiming the ‘Lady of Quality’ is a portrait by Raeburn of Alexander Schaw, Janet's brother: the face of the author remains invisible, shadowed only by its possible likeness to the public face of Alexander and to that of her mother whose portrait is given later in the text. The voyages that Janet Schaw charts in this Journal were made at first in the company of her brother, Alexander Schaw, who had been appointed searcher of customs at St Christopher, and of the children, Fanny (18), John (11) and William, ‘Billie’ (9), of John Rutherford of North Carolina whose sister, Anne, had been the first wife of Janet's second brother Robert Schaw, himself settled in America. The group was also accompanied by Janet's ‘abigail’, Mrs Mary Miller, who becomes the comic villainess of the first half of the journey. Janet was then the only one of the group who did not have to travel, who made the arduous journey apparently out of family solidarity and perhaps sheer desire for the adventure.