Diplomacy and Memoir-Writing: Representing Asia in Flora Annie Steel and Isabella Bishop

Abstract

For late nineteenth-century Victorians full of curiosity about their world, travelers writing home with narratives of the exotic served as one source of an imagined East. Among such traveler-writers were two extraordinary women, Flora Annie Steel (1847-1929) and Isabella Bird Bishop (1831-1904), who spent much of their lives in foreign lands and published influential books that contributed to the representations of Asia that catered to the curiosities of the non-traveling Victorian public. Steel lived in India for two decades and became an authority on India, drawing upon this expertise to publish novels such as On the Face of the Waters (1897), her most widely read work and a fictionalized retelling of events from the Sepoy Rebellion, or Indian Mutiny, of 1857. Bishop was in her early sixties when she first traveled to Korea, already a famed world traveler, and her impressions of a Korea on the cusp of modernity were catalogued in Korea and Her Neighbours (1898). My approach in this essay borrows from a post-Edward Said understanding of East-West relations during high imperialism to be at least as much about finding similarity as difference, indeed viewing the metropole-other relationship as more interactive than antagonistic. Within this context, I point out that Steel grants her female protagonist Kate Erlton the opportunity to disguise herself as an Afghan woman, and to discover a reawakening of her sexual and social self within the confusion of the Sepoy Rebellion. Meanwhile, Bishop’s views on Korean women in her travel narrative are tempered by moments of reverse ethnography in which Bishop herself seems to be on display－as that rarity of an Englishwoman－to local Koreans as much as her ethnographic eye is trained on them. In both these texts, Asia becomes a place that writes back, that offers opportunities and resistance to the British women, rather than remaining a site of passive representation.