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Apart from men, the representation of places plays a significant part in the building of Maria Graham’s texts and literary persona. For instance, the prevailing nineteenth-century discourse on colonialism acquires a positive hue when she is describing India, a country that was then a British colony. However, she later inverts her outlook when she arrives in Chile, a former Spanish colony. When she describes Brazil, which had ceased to be a colony of Portugal in 1805 to become the seat of a European kingdom, her vision takes a new direction. Similar reversals as well as omissions take place in the representations of slavery in the different places the writer is confronted with it, or in her encounters with expressions of religious faith in her travels.
This biography reconstructs Maria Graham’s literary image by means of significant passages of her work, memoirs, diaries, journals, and letters. The chosen texts are meant to illustrate salient features of her style and of her interaction with the prevalent ideologies of her time. The intention is to display a groundbreaking female intellectual who captured for her readers the ancient culture of India as deftly as she represented bloodthirsty bandits in the north of Italy or nascent countries in South America. Definitely a woman worth knowing.