In Writing Home, Mary Suzanne Schriber offers the first comprehensive analysis of the large body of U.S. women's travel literature written between the pre-Civil War years and World War I.

Examining almost a century's worth of published book-length accounts, ranging from the travel diaries of ordinary women to the narratives of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edith Wharton, Schriber argues persuasively for the importance of gender considerations in the reading of all travel texts.

She discusses the differences between men's and women's constructions, in writing, of their experiences abroad - differences that extend beyond more observations to the way each gender is treated in foreign cultures, responds to them, and seizes the occasion of travel and writing to do cultural work.