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List of women travelers

by genderdesk

"...the three women explorers known to everyone—Lady Hester Stanhope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Isabella Bird—...the archetypal Victorian Lady Traveller."

Through some fluke, I have stumbled on a cache of women travelers, in the index of a paywalled book on the Internet Archive. The list was compiled by a woman who worked in an antiquarian bookstore. The book is Wayward Women by Jane Robinson. It has three hundred and fifty woman travelers, who between them, produced a thousand or so books, over sixteen centuries. Perhaps we shall even be able to find scans -- free, open source scans -- of some of their books.

"But by their very nature, women travel writers were in the past (and still are, to some extent) a nonconformist race, and I soon discovered that their own accounts roundly defy any pigeon-holing. In the fourth century, for instance, in the abbess Etheria's account of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land we read not only of the religious significance of her journey, but of the doltish tour-guide she has been allotted and the difficulties of mountaineering on Mount Sinai. Mary Wollstonecraft is celebrated as one of our pioneer feminists—and yet the secret voyage she made in 1795 to Scandinavia was undertaken all for the love of a cad. Isabella Bird, whose pan-global travels crowded the second half of the nineteenth century, was a meek and dutiful woman at home, but once let loose in what she sublimely called 'the congenial barbarism of the desert' she assumed a most unladylike 'up-to-anything free-legged air', while her contemporary Mary Kingsley canoed herself serenely through the white waters of West African rivers dressed impeccably in black silk and bonnet."

Shall we get started?

First, the list. We strip out all the extraneous code, until we are left with just a simple annotated bibliography, starting with names from the text, then names from the index. Perhaps alphabetize them a bit to eliminate duplicates. We have roughly A-L of the alphabet, plus whatever names appear in associated text.

Here are some highlights of the book:

the abbess Etheria, 4th c. pilgrimage to the Holy Land and the difficulties of mountaineering on Mount Sinai
Mary Wollstonecraft - secret voyage in 1795 to Scandinavia for the love of a cad.
Isabella Bird, pan-global travels in the second half of the nineteenth century
,Mary Kingsley canoed herself serenely through the white waters of West African rivers dressed impeccably in black silk and bonnet.

So let's pick out one toy to play with while we get the rest of this mess organized, below the fold. The toy of the day is....The Golden Chersonese, published in 1883 by Isabella Bird, 'chersonese' being a romantic name for any peninsula, and in this case the land between Thailand and Sumatra then known as the Malay Native States. "It was a eulogistic account of her journey through tropical swamps and fragrant forests as a privileged guest of the British Protectorate:..."