Fanny Kemble, the notable actress and writer, was one of the first women to experience the ‘flying’ sensation of the railway in August 1830, one month before the official opening of the Liverpool–Manchester line in September of the same year. By the side of the line's ‘visionary’ maker, ‘the master of all these marvels’, George Stephenson, with whom she professed to be ‘most horribly in love’ (280, 283), Kemble experienced the magic of locomotion. In the above-quoted letters she later collected in her autobiographical book, Kemble recorded the psychosomatic effects this trial journey had on her as well as the political climate and technological innovation that helped actualise the venture. Rhythmical motion, incalculable speed, identification with the mighty thrust of the engine and its ‘cutting’ power, and surrender to an invisible force which, nevertheless, inspires a sense of security, not dread or anxiety, are all felt by Kemble who, with bonnet off and no fear of exposure to the elements or to her fellow passengers, has a taste of a new social space which throughout the ‘The Age of Transition’ would become an important setting for the exploration of the subjectivity of women in literal and social transit.

This book examines Victorian and early modernist representations of women's experience of locomotion and the spaces of the railway at a period of heightened physical mobility and urbanisation.