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Glowing Still: A woman's life on the road
Sara Wheeler is Britain's foremost woman travel writer. Glowing Still is the story of her travelling life - what is 'important, revealing or funny' - in a notoriously testosterone-laden field. Growing up among blue-collar Conservatives in Bristol where 'we didn't know anyone who wasn't like us', Wheeler knew she needed to get away. In her twenties she began a dramatic escape: Pole to Pole, via Poland.
Glowing Still recalls happy days on India's Puri Express; an Antarctic lavatory through which a seal popped up (hot fishy breath!); and the louche life of a Parisian shopgirl. Corralling reindeer with the Sámi in Arctic Sweden and towing her baby on a sledge, a helpful herdsman advised her to put foil down her bra to facilitate nursing.
Launching at Nubility, Wheeler voyages, via small children, to the welcoming port of Invisibility (she leaves Immobility for the next volume). As she writes in the introduction, when she set sail 'Role models were scarce in the travel-writing game.' But advancing years usher in unheralded freedoms, and journey's end finds Wheeler at peace among Zanzibar dhows, contemplating our connection with other lives - the irreplaceable value that travel brings - and paying homage to her heroines.
Glowing Still recalls happy days on India's Puri Express; an Antarctic lavatory through which a seal popped up (hot fishy breath!); and the louche life of a Parisian shopgirl. Corralling reindeer with the Sámi in Arctic Sweden and towing her baby on a sledge, a helpful herdsman advised her to put foil down her bra to facilitate nursing.
Launching at Nubility, Wheeler voyages, via small children, to the welcoming port of Invisibility (she leaves Immobility for the next volume). As she writes in the introduction, when she set sail 'Role models were scarce in the travel-writing game.' But advancing years usher in unheralded freedoms, and journey's end finds Wheeler at peace among Zanzibar dhows, contemplating our connection with other lives - the irreplaceable value that travel brings - and paying homage to her heroines.
- GenresTravelNonfictionMemoir
368 pages, Hardcover
Published March 16, 2023
21 people are currently reading
191 people want to read
About the author
Sara Wheeler
39 books132 followersSara Wheeler was brought up in Bristol and studied Classics and Modern Languages at Brasenose College, University of Oxford. After writing about her travels on the Greek island of Euboea and in Chile, she was accepted by the US National Science Foundation as their first female writer-in-residence at the South Pole, and spent seven months in Antarctica.
In her resultant book Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, she mentioned sleeping in the captain’s bunk in Scott's Hut. Whilst in Antarctica she read The Worst Journey in the World, an account of the Terra Nova Expedition, and she later wrote a biography of its author Apsley Cherry-Garrard.
In 1999 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. From 2005 to 2009 she served as Trustee of the London Library.
She was frequently abroad for two years, travelled to Russia, Alaska, Greenland, Canada and North Norway to write her book The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic. A journalist at the Daily Telegraph in the UK called it a "snowstorm of historical, geographical and anthropological facts".
In a 2012 BBC Radio 4 series: To Strive and Seek, she told the personal stories of five various members of the Terra Nova Expedition.
O My America!: Second Acts in a New World records the lives of women who travelled to America in the first half of the 19th Century: Fanny Trollope, Fanny Kemble, Harriet Martineau, Rebecca Burlend, Isabella Bird, and Catherine Hubback, and the author's travels in pursuit of them.
In her resultant book Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, she mentioned sleeping in the captain’s bunk in Scott's Hut. Whilst in Antarctica she read The Worst Journey in the World, an account of the Terra Nova Expedition, and she later wrote a biography of its author Apsley Cherry-Garrard.
In 1999 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. From 2005 to 2009 she served as Trustee of the London Library.
She was frequently abroad for two years, travelled to Russia, Alaska, Greenland, Canada and North Norway to write her book The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic. A journalist at the Daily Telegraph in the UK called it a "snowstorm of historical, geographical and anthropological facts".
In a 2012 BBC Radio 4 series: To Strive and Seek, she told the personal stories of five various members of the Terra Nova Expedition.
O My America!: Second Acts in a New World records the lives of women who travelled to America in the first half of the 19th Century: Fanny Trollope, Fanny Kemble, Harriet Martineau, Rebecca Burlend, Isabella Bird, and Catherine Hubback, and the author's travels in pursuit of them.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
May 8, 2023
This was an enjoyable look back at Sara Wheeler's travel writing career. I've read five of her previous books, including several set in polar regions; I'm fascinated by life in extreme climates. Each chapter is about a particular destination, revisited through her memories and photos as well as the notebooks she kept at the time. What's particularly interesting is learning about what she left out of the finished books; distressing though not surprising to find that often this was sexist treatment (and sometimes love affairs).
And yet she's been very lucky, as she acknowledges, especially to be able to raise two sons and sometimes take them with her. The question of motherhood is one she keeps circling back to. Dervla Murphy was one of her rare role models who managed to combine motherhood and intrepid travel. As a teenager, Wheeler writes, "I had internalised the notion that in order to succeed one had to become an honorary man." So her feminist awakening is an essential part of the backstory to her travels. She remarks later on that, as the chair of a UK travel book award, she was shocked to discover that only a quarter of the entries are by women.
Wheeler claims no special genius or expertise; she insists that most of her travel decisions were made on the basis of instinct or whim. Yet she has an eye for the telling detail, such as when she meets medical students in Bangladesh and they admit that, though they have textbook knowledge of neurology, they have never seen an MRI machine and are unlikely to; or when she realizes that the table she has been playing cards on on a supply ship to Cape Horn is actually a coffin.
My level of engagement was in proportion to my personal attraction to certain regions, so I ended up skimming over the China, India and Russia material quite quickly but reading other sections in depth. She was researching the Bronx for a book when Covid hit and she had to leave the USA quickly; I wonder if this project will still lead to a publication. Wheeler has also written biographies and book reviews, and I was keen to read her thoughts on those types of writing, on what makes for a good travel book, and on the environmental impact of travel:
At the end of the book she acknowledges that she probably could not have embarked on this career nowadays, because of how knowledge of the climate crisis, pandemics, and worries over cultural appropriation have changed the travel scene.
Although it's all new material, this volume would function as a good taster for readers new to Wheeler's work, to get an idea of which of her books they might want to seek out.
And yet she's been very lucky, as she acknowledges, especially to be able to raise two sons and sometimes take them with her. The question of motherhood is one she keeps circling back to. Dervla Murphy was one of her rare role models who managed to combine motherhood and intrepid travel. As a teenager, Wheeler writes, "I had internalised the notion that in order to succeed one had to become an honorary man." So her feminist awakening is an essential part of the backstory to her travels. She remarks later on that, as the chair of a UK travel book award, she was shocked to discover that only a quarter of the entries are by women.
Wheeler claims no special genius or expertise; she insists that most of her travel decisions were made on the basis of instinct or whim. Yet she has an eye for the telling detail, such as when she meets medical students in Bangladesh and they admit that, though they have textbook knowledge of neurology, they have never seen an MRI machine and are unlikely to; or when she realizes that the table she has been playing cards on on a supply ship to Cape Horn is actually a coffin.
My level of engagement was in proportion to my personal attraction to certain regions, so I ended up skimming over the China, India and Russia material quite quickly but reading other sections in depth. She was researching the Bronx for a book when Covid hit and she had to leave the USA quickly; I wonder if this project will still lead to a publication. Wheeler has also written biographies and book reviews, and I was keen to read her thoughts on those types of writing, on what makes for a good travel book, and on the environmental impact of travel:
Michael Holroyd, master of the biographer's craft and the writer I would like to be, told me that only two criteria matter in the selection of subject: early death and good handwriting.
You learn a lot from reviewing, and it complements the travel writer's craft; as Jonathan Raban wrote, 'It's as hard to bring a book convincingly to life on the page as it is a landscape.'
(of Sybille Bedford's A Visit to Don Otavio:) The book is a confection of close observation, history, specificity, invention and humour, together forming the priceless yeast that makes a travel book rise.
I remain loyal to the travel writing form. It is the perfect vehicle in which to smuggle the ineffable, the unsayable and the randomly comic.
Cheap energy has been the single most important factor in the environmental landscape of my travelling lifetime
At the end of the book she acknowledges that she probably could not have embarked on this career nowadays, because of how knowledge of the climate crisis, pandemics, and worries over cultural appropriation have changed the travel scene.
Although it's all new material, this volume would function as a good taster for readers new to Wheeler's work, to get an idea of which of her books they might want to seek out.
November 23, 2023
Maybe 3.5! I've always enjoyed Sara Wheeler's writing - Terra Incognita is a gem. This one is a survey of her travel experiences over the years and gives a (firmly feminist) overview of travel writing in general. Wheeler can be very funny, and she includes some horror stories that make you wonder why anyone would ever embark on a life of travel.
June 22, 2023
Sara Wheeler’s memoir of life on the road begins with Dervla Murphy flashing her tits. This sets the tone for a thoroughly enjoyable journey.
A self-described ‘generalist’, Wheeler has followed her curiosity to the world’s most distant corners: the Greek island of Evia, Antarctic research stations, the rocky spine of Chile, and so many other places before, after and in between.
There’s much to be said for her approach. While a specialist’s knowledge of a single place is deep, the generalist brings a cross-cultural perspective steeped in broad experience, paired with a fresh set of eyes that observe the details of a place for the first time.
Wheeler is a perceptive guide, and Glowing Still broadens her scope to include aging and the passage of time.
She writes of turning 30 in Chile “still imbued with the sense of invisibility associated with the young”, and of “those unanticipated bursts of emotional intensity” and “splashes of passion” that colour our early lives on the road — splashes of passion she would give anything to get back.
At 50, she “learned to live with a constant hum of anxiety, as most do” and “bone-weary revulsion” at the endless cycle of misery humans inflict on one another.
That weariness passed, or at least settled into something else. “I could see clearly again," she writes. "I had learned by this time that you really do take yourself with you when you run across the sea, and that there is little point in fostering illusions.”
Perhaps vividness and immediacy are properties of our first big journey? The sense of each encounter and each event being of monumental importance; the confidence that we’ve figured out a new way to live, and have come back changed.
We become jaded when subsequent journeys don’t peel us down to our essence again. As Wheeler said, you take yourself with you when you cross the sea, but you also bring yourself back.
Maybe what we miss from youth is the ability to hold on to those illusions — and believe in them?
A self-described ‘generalist’, Wheeler has followed her curiosity to the world’s most distant corners: the Greek island of Evia, Antarctic research stations, the rocky spine of Chile, and so many other places before, after and in between.
There’s much to be said for her approach. While a specialist’s knowledge of a single place is deep, the generalist brings a cross-cultural perspective steeped in broad experience, paired with a fresh set of eyes that observe the details of a place for the first time.
Wheeler is a perceptive guide, and Glowing Still broadens her scope to include aging and the passage of time.
She writes of turning 30 in Chile “still imbued with the sense of invisibility associated with the young”, and of “those unanticipated bursts of emotional intensity” and “splashes of passion” that colour our early lives on the road — splashes of passion she would give anything to get back.
At 50, she “learned to live with a constant hum of anxiety, as most do” and “bone-weary revulsion” at the endless cycle of misery humans inflict on one another.
That weariness passed, or at least settled into something else. “I could see clearly again," she writes. "I had learned by this time that you really do take yourself with you when you run across the sea, and that there is little point in fostering illusions.”
Perhaps vividness and immediacy are properties of our first big journey? The sense of each encounter and each event being of monumental importance; the confidence that we’ve figured out a new way to live, and have come back changed.
We become jaded when subsequent journeys don’t peel us down to our essence again. As Wheeler said, you take yourself with you when you cross the sea, but you also bring yourself back.
Maybe what we miss from youth is the ability to hold on to those illusions — and believe in them?
August 12, 2024
I bought this book in Dartmouth, United Kingdom this summer and greatly enjoyed reading about the author's travels while traveling around Europe. The book is structured as a series of essays that forms a memoir in travel writing. Wheeler discusses how the nature of travel, travel writing and attitudes toward women traveling have changed over her decades long career and she has an eye for telling anecdotes and engaging stories that capture the history, landscape and cultures of the places she visits. My favourite chapter was about Antarctica and I look forward to reading her previous book, Terra Incognita.
October 7, 2023
What a life!
Never a disappointment among Sara's books, this one gives us more of HER. We are the same age, and I have never travelled, except THROUGH her. But she has made me feel as though I have been on every walking path, boat, train, or plane with her. Yet another wonderful and worthy read.
Never a disappointment among Sara's books, this one gives us more of HER. We are the same age, and I have never travelled, except THROUGH her. But she has made me feel as though I have been on every walking path, boat, train, or plane with her. Yet another wonderful and worthy read.
September 13, 2024
This is one of those books that you can pick up anytime, read a chapter and be transported to a completely different part of the world. It's very readable and very well written.
I loved the chapters on Antarctica and the stories of Wheeler travelling with her small children. Also the occasional insight into 1970s Bristol.
I loved the chapters on Antarctica and the stories of Wheeler travelling with her small children. Also the occasional insight into 1970s Bristol.
December 15, 2025
Read following the Kendal Mountain festival interview
Interesting adventurous woman
Interesting adventurous woman
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews