‘[T]he Foreground Is Changed’

When Frances Vickris Dickinson published her first article on Italy under the pseudonym of Florentia in the New Monthly Magazine in November 1853, it was with the recognition that it was an unpropitious time for Italianate travel writing. Dickinson began making extended trips to Italy following her marital separation from John Edward Geils in 1845, having become ostracized from the elite social circles in which she moved at home. With British touristic and political interest in Italy in decline, Dickinson ultimately understood that success rested on selling the travel writer rather than the travel destination. Dickinson’s articles resemble other post-revolutionary women’s travel accounts in breaking the symbolic relationship between female and Italian independence. At a time when women writers’ literary names were dependent upon their private reputations, the kind of ‘invisibility’ that pseudonymity offered Dickinson helped rather than hindered her literary reputation.