Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady Explorers

Abstract

What spurred so many Victorian women to leave behind the security and comfort of their middle-class homes to undertake perilous journeys of thousands of miles, tramping through rainforests, caravanning across deserts and scaling mountain ranges? How were they able to travel so freely in exotic lands, when in their own countries such independence was denied them? This book draws on the diaries, letters and other writings of more than 50 such women to describe their experiences and aspirations. In addressing the question of whether women like Mary Kingsley and Isabella Bird were the intrepid bluestockings of popular history, or in fact early feminists, Dea Birkett concludes that they were neither; that, dissatisfied with the cramped lives prescribed for them in Victorian society, they sought new horizons abroad, discovering in these distant places a degree of freedom and respect unimaginable to them as spinsters at home. She explores the conflict in these women between duty and desire - the wish to observe and transgress the bounds of acceptable behaviour. Dea Birkett also wrote Jella: A Woman At Sea.

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