Women's Travel Writings in Italy, Part I

Betty Hagglund

Part I Volumes 1-2 [Lady Anna Riggs Miller], Letters from Italy (1777) Anna Riggs' Letters offer an unusually forthright and detailed account of Italy and the arts in the 1770s. Ridiculed by Horace Walpole for her poor grasp of foreign languages, Riggs's detailed, confident and knowledgeable discussion of Italian art collections nevertheless challenges a male-dominated world of connoisseurship and offers the modern reader one of the fullest demonstrations of fine art criticism in the late eighteenth century. Volumes 3-4 Hester Lynch Piozzi, Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy and Germany (1789) Constantly shifting in register and style, Piozzi's observations continue to divide critical opinion; variously characterized as inept or experimental, acutely aware of Johnson, Reynolds and Burke, fascinated by the literary and the quotidian, Piozzi highlights the flexible and ambiguous positions and perspectives inhabited and articulated by eighteenth-century women travel writers.