Celia Fiennes

CF was a remarkable, indeed a unique, travel-writer about her own country. Travelling in the later seventeenth and the early eighteenth century, and writing the account that has come down to us in the latter, she is an immediate (independent instead of employed) predecessor of Daniel Defoe in his role as national surveyor. She was not an influence, however, for her work took a century even to be quoted in print, and longer still to be printed itself.