Cultures in Dialogue returns to active circulation out of print sources by women writers from the East and the West. Series two focuses on the politics and poetics of western women travelling to the East from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries.
Written by one of the most scandalous figures in the beau monde and published just prior to the French Revolution, A Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople (1789) transported readers to the most exclusive courts of Russia and the Ottoman Empire.
Diagnosed with tuberculosis, Lady Lucie Duff Gordon left her family in London in 1862 to take up permanent residence in Upper Egypt or the Saeed. There she wrote Letters from Egypt (1865), which offers an intimate portrayal of the social life of the Saeed, connecting happenings there with international politics and issues around race, class, nation, and gender.