May Alcott Nieriker's travel correspondence and diaries readily demonstrate the complexity and the exuberance of her relatively brief life. It was a life of change, sometimes internally driven and other times externally imposed, yet always leading to both personal and professional transformations. Artistically, she went from publicly criticized illustrations for the first edition of Little Women to having two paintings accepted into the rigorously competitive Paris Salon. Personally, May spent much of her life as an independent single woman training indefatigably both in the United States and in Europe to establish a career as a professional fine artist at a time when that was far from the norm for nineteenth-century women. Yet then her career faced new challenges when she fell in love and married at the age of 38, and had a baby at 39. Layered upon all of this, and driven by her needs as an artist, was a mutable sense of “home,” which alternated between Concord, Massachusetts; London; and Paris. Eventually, May's identity as an American was so unsettled by her European sojourns, and her identities as an artist and a woman were so fulfilled there, that she ultimately preferred to remain in Europe rather than return to her family in Concord, Massachusetts, despite their close ties.

What spurred these transformations? Undoubtedly a multitude of factors would have been involved, but in this chapter, and in keeping with the book's thesis, we will focus on the impact that travel abroad had on the life and career of May Alcott Nieriker. As Kristi Siegel and other scholars have noted, the issue of identity in relation to women's travel writing is an essential one; Siegel writes: “Arguably, whether travel writers record the collision of their identity with a new culture or not, travel necessarily brings about change. Travelers might lose their sense of identity altogether or, conversely, find their sense of self sharpened by the journey.”