Political Affairs of the Heart

In Van Netten Blimke’s impressively researched study, four writers from across the political spectrum use sentimental travel to intervene in debates about colonialism, war, and national or imperial identity, significantly advancing our understanding of women writers’ strategies for navigating gender constraints in a literary genre that women had just recently entered.'  Elizabeth Bohls, coeditor of Travel Writing 1700-1830: An Anthology

Van Netten Blimke reveals the many ways in which women travel writers used the language and tropes of sensibility as they explored the lessons of the world-changing events of the French and American Revolutions. Her lively study will be of interest to anyone working in the eighteenth century as it excavates the complex intellectual milieus represented in these widely underrated books. Katherine Turner, editor of A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy

Richly researched and elegantly argued, Political Affairs of the Heart recovers the complex contemporary resonances of eighteenth-century sentimental travel writing and demonstrates emphatically how women used the form to make a variety of interventions in political and moral debate. Carl Thompson, author of The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination

In Van Netten Blimke’s impressively researched study, four writers from across the political spectrum use sentimental travel to intervene in debates about colonialism, war, and national or imperial identity, significantly advancing our understanding of women writers’ strategies for navigating gender constraints in a literary genre that women had just recently entered.'  Elizabeth Bohls, coeditor of Travel Writing 1700-1830: An Anthology

Van Netten Blimke reveals the many ways in which women travel writers used the language and tropes of sensibility as they explored the lessons of the world-changing events of the French and American Revolutions. Her lively study will be of interest to anyone working in the eighteenth century as it excavates the complex intellectual milieus represented in these widely underrated books. Katherine Turner, editor of A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy

Richly researched and elegantly argued, Political Affairs of the Heart recovers the complex contemporary resonances of eighteenth-century sentimental travel writing and demonstrates emphatically how women used the form to make a variety of interventions in political and moral debate. Carl Thompson, author of The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination

In Political Affairs of the Heart, Van Netten Blimke insightfully analyzes the discursive challenges in women’s travel writing. Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Blimke’s writing is lively, the travelogues are intriguing, the rhetorical and historical interpretations are well-grounded in period and contemporary literatures, and the arguments for the political import of not only each woman’s individual writing but their impact within their times and communities are thought-provoking. Women & Language