A Curious Life for a Lady

Pat Barr

Published by Penguin , softcover, illustrated

When in 1872, at the age of forty, the rather earnest daughter of a country parson abandoned the rectory nest and began her pioneering journeys to some of the most inhospitable corners of the world, she was aware that she was escaping the frustrations and shackles of Victorian middle-class life. As she remarked, `travellers are privileged to do the most improper things'.

Isabella Bird was a woman of remarkable gifts. Undismayed by discomfort or danger and undeterred by physical weakness, she was to spend almost thirty years travelling — to the Rocky Mountains, the Sandwich Isles, to Japan, Malaya, Kashmir and Tibet, to Persia, Korea and China — where an indomitable spirit, an unassuming cordiality and, above all, a limitless capacity for being interested won her universal welcome. Her accounts of her experiences became best-selling books and established for Isabella Bird a reputation as one of the great travel writers of her day.