Travel Accounts by Victorian Women Travelers in China and Tibet

Travel literature has had a long and varied history. In his book Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel, Percy C. Adams pointed out that travel literature has existed since the beginnings of oral and written literature (38). Exodus in the Old Testament of the Bible is a travel account. Homer\u27s Odyssey and Virgil\u27s Aeneid both qualify. Herodotus claimed to be writing a history, but he included what he actually saw while traveling, which is a travel account. Polemo of Ilium produced travel guide books [sic] as far back as 200 AD. In the thirteenth century Marco Polo traveled to the Orient and produced his own account of this trip. In the fourteenth century, Chaucer used a travel format in Canterbury Tales. Cervantes followed in the fifteenth Century with his form of travel narrative in Don Quixote. By the seventeenth century travel literature had achieved a certain importance. It was, as Robert Crowley pointed out, the favorite reading material of Milton. Milton acquired the abundant and colorful details he used in his poetry from reading travel accounts (Crowley vii)