Victorian Lady Travellers

"This was published way back in 1965, although there has been a reprint since then. It’s about seven Victorian women travellers. It’s the book that first alerted me to the fact that there were more than one or two of them. When I came upon it, I hadn’t yet heard about Mary Seacole and she isn’t in this book. But there are various extremely eccentric, extremely interesting and interested women about whom I had no idea, who travelled to all corners of the globe. So there was a precedent for Mary travelling and she did see herself first and foremost as a woman traveller. Reading this book just opens a whole new world, because most of the travel accounts before had been by men. They’ve got certain agendas, whereas the accounts by women can talk about how women are feeling about what they see and the day-to-day trivia of being on the road. That’s something Mary expresses very well when she writes. This book sets the scene for people like Mary who were stepping outside the confines of their upbringing, and doing something really brave. There are all sorts of women traveling for all sorts of reasons. That’s another surprise I had when I first came upon this book, because I assumed that woman travellers would just be tourists, perhaps going to places where most tourists hadn’t gone before. But there are missionaries and women who are working for a living abroad. There are women who travel because they need money. There are women who travel because they have money, of course, but even then, they’re traveling to extraordinary places, and writing extraordinary books about them. It’s not just a question of moneyed ladies wandering around the world with their own little portable Britain wherever they go. It covers women who are really stepping out into the unknown to find out something about themselves and about the people that they’re meeting."