Women in Italy: Amy Dorrit to Lucy Honeychurch

Abstract

This article examines Dickens's most famous tourist, 'Little' Dorrit, in relation to other literary women visitors to Italy, including George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke (Middlemarch, 1871-72), Henry James's Isabel Archer (The Portrait of a Lady, 1880-81), and E. M. Forster's Lucy Honeychurch (A Room with a View, 1908). For these authors, Italy's artistic, emotional, and sexual intensity provided an environment in which to situate and explore female subjectivity and creativity. This essay compares and contrasts the emotional and imaginative responses and experiences of these different but intertwined fictional travellers. Its focus is on the inner life-on impressions and sensations-and the 'empathetic response' to Italy; Amy Dorrit is one of Dickens's most imaginative characters, reflecting and transmuting his experience of Italy as liberating and bewildering, in ways that are particular to the moral themes and affective trajectory of this novel. © 2012 The Author.