At home in Rome? The place of the domestic in Frances Elliot's Italian essays

Between 1852 and 1868, Frances Elliot published over fifty periodical essays and the vast majority of these took Italy as their subject, combining travel writing with art history. Elliot's travel writing arose from adverse personal circumstances: a protracted divorce from an abusive marriage brought her extensive negative publicity so, from the early 1850s, she spent much of her time in Italy. Travel – and travel writing – thus offered Elliot a valuable mode of re-invention, ensuring she was no longer confined by a domestic sphere in which she had suffered sexual violence, coercive control, and other forms of abuse. Deploying the pseudonym ‘Florentia,’ Elliot could erase her former identity as an abused and silenced wife. Nonetheless, Elliot's Italian essays attest to the lingering impact of her traumatic first marriage. With their vacillation between disclosure and disguise, fact and fiction, Elliot's Italian essays often imply a past experience of trauma without directly acknowledging it. Such disavowal offers a form of self-defence against a painful past but it also complicates the overt expressions of independence and agency by the narrator, as well as rendering the home an ambivalent space in these essays.