This article explores the travel writings, illustrated with photographs, of Fanny Stevenson and Beatrice Grimshaw, two 'lady travelers' who visited the Pacific Islands at the turn of the twentieth century. Although little critical attention has been paid to their books, these texts are significant contributions to the comparatively small archive ofEuro-American women's narratives of travel and encounter in the Pacific Islands from this period. Their representations of the Islands are at once conventional and unusual, and analysis of their texts adds significantly to the literature on women's travel writing, especially as the Pacific Islands are an underrepresented area in this field. Rather than producing generalized exoticist representations, their discussions of class, race, gender, and colonial politics are particular to the Pacific Islands, and illustrate various moments of contact at a key transition point in Pacific colonial history. Their use of photographs also forges a strong connection between their work and a longer history of image production by Westerners in the Pacific Islands. Using colonial history as a framework for exploration of class, race, and gender politics in the Pacific Islands, this essay argues that Stevenson and Grimshaw's works suggest ways that popular audiences may have experienced the Pacific Islands through word and image publications. Grimshaw's book was fairly popular upon publication, Stevenson's was not widely read at the time, and there is little contemporary critical analysis of either work. Nevertheless, their illustrated books shed extensive light on the political and social theater of the Pacific Islands at a key moment in both Island and Western colonial history. Both books speak to the continued importance of the image in marketing the eastern and central Pacific Islands as potential destination for travel or settlement, and their combination of text and photographs also heightened the experience of their readers, particularly as the truth value of photographs remained (relatively) in place in the early twentieth century. The two texts also add significantly to the current discourse on women's travel writings in both Pacific and global contexts. Altogether, a comparison of their texts suggests ways British and American women may have experienced the Pacific Islands, both as authors/image-makers and as readers/viewers. Stevenson's and Grimshaw's books emerge from a primarily male-authored archive to reveal that the construction of the Pacific Islands by and for anglophone women at the beginning of the twentieth century was unstable and shifting, intersecting with discourses of race, class, gender, and colonialism in complex ways.
Waldroup, Heather. (2009).Although Stevenson and Grimshaw are part of a small group of women travelers to the Pacific who recorded their accounts, their texts are not distinctive solely because they are written by women, and I do not juxtapose their works here in order to suggest an essential category of 'women travelers' for which Stev...
