- Hardcover: 312 pages
- Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell; First Edition First Impression edition (6 April 1989)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0631156046
- ISBN-13: 978-0631156048
- Product Dimensions: 23.5 x 14.7 x 2.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,324,643 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
What spurred so many Victorian women to leave behind their secure middle-class homes and undertake perilous journeys of thousands of miles, tramping through tropical forests, caravanning across deserts, and scaling mountain ranges? And how were they able to travel so freely in exotic lands, when at home such independence was denied to them? This book draws upon the diaries and writings of more than 50 such women to describe their experiences and aspirations. Many of the journeys they made are re-constructed - Mary Gaunt's voyage along the West African coast, Mary Kingsley's jungle treks, Amelia Edwards's thousand-mile journey up the Nile and Isabella Bird's ascent of the Rocky Mountains are just a few. Were women such as Mary Kingsley and Isabella Bird simply the intrepid blue-stockings of popular history, or early feminists? Dea Birkett aruges that they were in fact neither - dissatisfied with the restricted lives prescribed for them by Victorian society, they sought and found new horizons abroad, and a degree of freedom and respect only afforded in their own countries to men.
About the Author
Dea Birkett was born in 1958 and is an author, journalist and traveller. She won the Somerset Maughan Award for Jella: From Lagos to Liverpool: A woman at Sea in a Man's World. Her other books include Serpent in Paradise, an account of her time on Pitcairn Island with the descendants of the Bounty Mutineers and Amazonians: The Penguin book of Women's Travel writing.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Our Book Group chose this as our latest book and we pretty much have regretted it. Whilst the story of each individual woman's life is indeed fascinating, the way the book has been put together is somewhat frustrating to read. The author has chosen to go by topics (e.g. family background, the journey out etc) and then proceeded to mention anecdotes from many women's lives all at once. It's virtually impossible to get a grip on what happened to each woman individually. Our preference as a Book Group would have been to have one woman's life covered in some detail, per chapter, then another and so on. Maybe at the end some kind of summary could have been given to tie together the threads. As it was, it was heavy going to read and not at all relaxing.
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