The Expatriate Life

At the intersection of life writing and travel writing, “relocation narratives” form a distinct subgenre of travel memoirs concerned with the everyday experiences of travellers who become settlers abroad through a process of voluntary migration and long-term foreign residency. This article offers a diachronic examination of autobiographical works by two writers who recount the intercultural competences they acquire through transnational relocation: first, a mid-1800s account by Susanna Moodie, Roughing it in the Bush: A Life in Canada (1852) and, second, a late-1990s account of resettled life in Tuscany by Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy (1996). These multipart memoirs map out a process of cultural accommodation over time through place-based social interactions that lead to the development of a cosmopolitan openness to cultural differences. The article examines the degree of self-awareness and engagement with difference of the transnational writers through their narrative accounts of self-transformation abroad.