A motor-flight through France - Edith Wharton

In A Motor-Flight through France, first published in 1908, Wharton takes pleasure in the novelty of the motor car, and the freedom it gives her to choose her own route, unlike travelling by train. As a motorist she gains 'the truest initiation of travel, the sense of continuity, of relation between districts'. She is aware that increased speed makes her journeys very different from the leisurely progress of previous travellers, and that she might miss some details, but points out that 'opportune' punctures provide frequent occasions to look around in unexpected places.

Her observations are witty and personal - the Gothic tomb of the cardinals at Rouen inspires a digression on the subject of noses - and like her occasional passenger, Henry James, she is intelligently appreciative of both architecture and scenery, though not always uncritical. Above all, Wharton believes that the traveller must have 'reverence for the accumulated experiences of the past' and is conscious that she comes from 'a land that has undertaken to get on without the past, or to regard it only as a "feature" of aesthetic interest, a sight to which one travels rather than a light by which one lives'.