The Virago Book of Women Travellers edited by Mary Morris (with Larry O'Connor)

Review by Elodie Barnes

‘The lady tourist will ever be, to her sex at large, but as a meteoric flash amidst the hosts of fixed stars that stud the sky’.

So wrote Mabel Sharman Crawford in her 1863 preface to ‘Through Algeria’. At a time when it was largely unacceptable for women to travel without an escort or chaperone — preferably in the form of a husband or father — it seemed inconceivable that ‘the lady tourist’ would ever be more than an exception to the male rule. Fortunately, she was wrong. This anthology brings together writing from women who dared to travel.

The varied extracts included span both space and time: from Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who caused a scandal in 1716 when she left London alone to follow her husband to Constantinople, to Leila Philip’s experiences of living amongst rice growers in 1980s Japan. Mostly (especially in the earlier years) they were women of the upper classes, white and privileged, with the money and resources to make their own way. They were also unusual in that they chronicled their experiences at all — even today, the majority of travel writers are men. But this doesn’t detract from the vitality and spirit of the book. While it’s clear that there is still some way to go before both gender and racial representation is more balanced in the genre at large, this anthology is a wonderful collection of writing; a broad overview of a type of feminism that says women have just as much right to adventure as men, that women, too, can see the world and write about it.

In her introduction, editor Mary Morris points out that there are interesting parallels between the language of travel and the language of ‘sexual initiation’. It’s common to talk of ‘sexual exploits’ and ‘sexual adventures’, and in both languages the great explorers have been men. Women historically were denied the freedom to leave home. Even the fashions of the day — corsets and stays, bound feet, dress hoops — literally limited a woman’s movement, and later writers such as Elizabeth Bishop, in her poem ‘Questions of Travel’, still assumed that women had some kind of ambivalence about travel, that there was always a longing for home attached to the desire to be away. Those women who have travelled extensively have not always had their voices heard.

Perhaps this is partly due to a preconceived idea that there is one way to travel and one way to write about it: the male way. Women necessarily travel differently. Their concerns are different, and so their experiences are different. It’s hard to imagine a man having to barricade the door of his room with ‘trunks, chairs, and whatever else I could place against it…[eventually] adding my own strength to the other securities’ against a violent intruder, as Eliza Farnham did in ‘Life in Prairie Land’.

Fear of rape is ever present, even when crossing a road at night as in Robin Morgan’s 'Demon Lover’, and Isabelle Eberhardt travelled through Morocco disguised as a man simply because it was safer. Her diaries reveal more of an inward journey than an outward one: she felt an outcast, forced into disguise for her own comfort, and yet barred from contact with the Arab women who could have helped her because of that same disguise.

Many of these extracts reveal personal stories; even when thousands of miles from home there was never an escape from the limitations of being a woman, and the need to prove capability. Isabella Bird, in her ascent of Long’s Peak in the Rocky Mountains — an ascent that was beyond the skill and endurance of many male mountaineers at the time — was concerned all the while that her companion would be ‘grievously disappointed, both in my courage and strength’ after a fall left her hanging ‘by my frock’ from a ledge.

There are some extraordinary feats of skill and endurance — Alexandra David-Neel, for example, who used the ancient Tibetan technique of ‘thumo reskiang’ to raise her body temperature when stranded on a glacial Tibetan plain overnight — and beautiful passages of lyrical description, rich in detail and poetics.

There is humour: when Mary Kingsley falls into an animal trap with twelve inch spikes on her journey across a West African swamp, she remarks: ‘It is at these moments you realise the blessings of a good thick skirt’. Above all, there are experiences, anecdotes and insights that bring the world these women saw to life. In a time when days are becoming darker and shorter, and armchair travel is all that most of us can realistically aspire to, this anthology makes a wonderful companion.

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The Virago Book of Women Travellers is published by Virago, 29th October 2020