As well as providing vivid and sympathetic accounts of geography, peoples, and cultures, three women writers use their books to chart their own historical and social positions. In Maps of Difference Wendy Roy explores the ways in which Anna Jameson, Mina Hubbard, and Margaret Laurence were attuned to the cultural imperialism underlying their travel writing.

Roy considers the connections Jameson makes between feminism and anti-racism in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838), Hubbard's insights in A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador (1908) into her relationship with First Nations men who had both more and less power than she, and Laurence's awareness of colonial and patriarchical oppression in her African memoir The Prophet's Camel Bell (1963). Roy also examines archival and First Nations accounts of these women's travels, and the sketches, photos, and maps that accompany their writing, to examine contradictions in and question the implied objectivity of travel narratives. She concludes by looking at the myth of getting there first and the ways in which new technologies of representation, including cameras, allow travellers and writers to claim new travel firsts.