Magical Sites

Women move beyond 19th century conventions to travel and write in Latin America.

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This intriguing group of travel journals reveals the voices of women who travelled in Latin America during the nineteenth century. From French nuns who left their homelands to establish convents in Latin America to well-bred English women who accompanied their husbands on business travels, these women discovered a world beyond anything they had known or expected and recorded it in their diaries. Includes previously unpublished work, as editor Marjorie Agosin found some of these diaries tucked away and forgotten in a musty convent library in Santiago, Chile. All entries show us the private thoughts and indomitable spirits of women who dared to move beyond the safety of hearth and home and in doing so, discovered not only new lands, but also themselves.