Taking as its primary texts Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's 1716 Turkish Embassy Letters, Mary Wollstonecraft's 1796 Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and Leonara Sansay's 1808 Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo, this thesis explores how each female-authored travelogue imbricates pedagogy with maternal embodiment. I argue that each author takes on a pedagogical perspective towards both the residents of the countries through which they travel, as well as their correspondents at home, training both groups to reconsider their conceptions of their own bodies and their capacity for child-rearing. Both Montagu and Wollstonecraft base their pedagogical potential in their maternal embodiment, while Sansay, in a novel with two childless sisters as protagonists, grants the two women quasi-maternal relations to one another based on their confident, pedagogical attempts on both local women and on each other. Montagu and Wollstonecraft, despite carefully constructed pedagogies directed at other women, find that pedagogy breaking down at the boundaries of their own bodies, as Montagu anxiously finds herself pregnant while training the Turkish women and her readers on the dangers of viewing pregnancy as an aesthetic necessity, while Wollstonecraft can only construct the sympathy with readers that drives her own pedagogical project through a constitutive distance from her own daughter. Sansay, by splitting herself across two fictionalized narrative personae, obviates that anxiety by granting her protagonists a homosocial relationship based in maternal and filial affection, and privileging their ability to educate one another.
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