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Preface
The truth is, I can expect happiness from posterity either way: if I write ill, happy in being forgotten; if well, happy in being remembered with respect.
—Maria Graham1
A visitor in Kensal Green Cemetery in north London these days may find it hard, if not impossible, to discover Maria Graham’s grave among the timeworn, moss-covered stones. Time has effaced her name from her tombstone, and it would appear as if the first half of her proposition had materialised, and she now lies ‘happy in being forgotten’. But that is not exactly true. In Chile, one of the two Latin American countries she wrote about in 1824, she is a well-known figure whose journal is periodically reissued, quoted, and discussed. In Brazil, the other country she visited in South America, she is known as a scholar and travel writer in academic circles, and as a gay icon in popular culture. Besides, one of her two published journals about India is widely read in Britain and the United States nowadays, and in all these countries her work is subject to theses, conferences, and chapters in academic publications that deal with travel writing, women’s studies, or colonial studies.