Figure 15. The 19th-century Travel Writings of Emilia Hornby.

A specific passage within Emilia Hornby’s travel texts emphasized how women travellers during the nineteenth-century did in fact highlight the personalities and individual stories of the harem. Additionally, she displays surprising sexual undertones in the attitude when encountering the Oriental men she meets (or hopes to meet) inside the harem. It is clear that her experience of being located within the harem, activated and liberated feminine desire, allowing the English woman to imagine herself as participant and witness to forbidden adventures normally reserved for men.

Figure 16. Mary Henriette Kingsley, circa 1890. She was a traveller and a collector, and wrote a about her travels in West Africa in 1893.

Her diaries detail journeys into swamps, traps, gorillas, snakes, and encounters with potentially hostile people. There is even a story that Kingsley once traded twelve of her own blouses to get out of a dangerous situation. However, she seemed to thrive on the danger, and she particularly enjoyed the party’s sojourns at Fan villages where she studied local customs. Kingsley often described her travels through the colonial framework, while often not adhering to the discourse of sexualizing foreign locales. Instead, she aligns herself explicitly with male adventuring narratives and undercuts the static representation of the East as a land of feminine sexual and social languor.