Off the Beaten Track: Three Centuries of Women Travellers

by Dea Birkett, Jan Morris (Introduction)

Off the Beaten Track takes us on an exhilarating journey through three centuries of travel, in the company of such women voyagers as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Vita Sackville-West, Isabella Bird and Freya Stark. Not only did women from Britain travel to the Americas, Russia and Turkey, Arabia and the Middle East, Africa and South-east Asia but women from all corners of the globe also visited Britain. This book records their experiences - where they went, what they looked like, how they evoked other lands and cultures in words and images, and what they brought back with them.
The common link between these women travellers is that their lives are celebrated in the National Portrait Gallery collections. While they all travelled for different reasons, collectively they illuminate Britain's relationship with other cultures and challenge assumptions about women's achievements.

Accompanies the exhibition Off the Beaten Track at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from 7 July to 31 October 2004.

Genres: Nonfiction, Travel, History

144 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Daren · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, published by the National Portrait Gallery is the companion book to the exhibition of the same name, in London, October 2004. To be fair, it is all about the portraits, and the short biographical piece of text that accompanies each portrait.
Woman Travellers covers a fairly diverse range of women - explorers, anthropologists, archaeologists, writers, artists & scholars, and from the 18th century to the 20th century.
The narrative looks to try and tie their various and varied stories together - sometimes tentatively, and it offered only short fragments of stories as it leaps left and right from one person to another, and from one century to another. It relies heavily on a small number of the more well known ladies - Isabella Bird (Bishop), Freya Stark, Mary Kingsley, Marianne North, Gertrude Bell, Constance Gordon Cumming, and to a lesser degree Rosita Forbes & Elizabeth Rigby and Amy Johnson.
Overall I didn't find the text great - too jumpy, but it was performing a function - to transition from one woman's story to the next, so it was jumpy of necessity I guess. There was also a lot of repetition of the information in the biography within the narrative of the book. As I say at the start, it is all about the portraits, and the short biographical piece of text that accompanies each portrait, and I don't think you would lose much by reading only these.

[Gretchen Bernet-Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

An astounding book in more ways than one---from exotic, lesser known locations and fascinating old photos, to women around the world who had the courage to explore and travel alone. There is a vintage bromide print (1902) which shows traveller Ina Sheldon-Williams dressed in white frills, painting two tribesmen with a horse and foal, in rather genteel surroundings. Unlike fish collector Mary Kingsley (1862-1900) who suffered overturning canoes, leeches and crocodiles in West Africa, and her thick skirts saved her when she fell into a pit of pointed spikes.

Ethel Mannin (1900-1984) an English woman who lived the stuff of literary dreams. Ethel was 23 years-old, had abandoned an early marriage and with one suitcase, a portable typewriter, a child of three and six words of French she went to the south of France in search of the violet fields, olive groves and orange trees. As Jan Morris said in the Forward "What they all had in common was their gender and their guts". Later, Ethel's writing enabled her to purchase a home in fashionable Wimbledon.

Interestingly Ethel's prodigious writing and her travelling were intertwined and she wrote fiction and non-fiction providing the reason for her travels. She described herself as "An emancipated, rebellious, and Angry Young Woman". I just love her 1930 National Gallery portrait---a strong look, perhaps later copied by young Wednesday in "The Addams Family". This is an enduring record of women in past centuries who did not stay home cooking and cleaning. It offers the young millennials something to think about---surviving without the internet.

Images on my blog https://thoughtsbecomewords.com/2021/...

[Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Originally read in 2004; reread in 2019)

This was a companion book for an exhibition of the same name at the National Portrait Gallery, London in 2004. I've got a fairly good collection of books by and about women travelers, and all my favorites are here: Freya Stark, Gertrude Bell, Mary Kingsley, Florence Baker, May French-Seldon, Isabella Bird, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Jane Digby... the list goes on and on. Particular attention is given to those British women who made their mark as explorers and (as in the case of Bell and Lady Mary) cultural and political analysts.

Especially enjoyable are the reproductions of portraits of the travelers and illustrations of lands they explored. While the book doesn't enter into great detail about any one traveler, it's an excellent overview, and I'm particularly pleased to have found a number of interesting women I'd never read about. The book has an excellent selected biography, so it'll be easy to do further reading on this subject.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have long been interested in female explorers, and this book did include women I have admired, such as Isabella Bird Bishop and Gertrude Bell. It also introduced me to other adventurous and intriguing women. The reason I rated this a three is that the book needs some editing. It is confusing in the way that it jumps around. This book is a companion to the National Portrait Gallery show on this topic, which was organized geographically. The book, though, is organized differently, and I found this to be a bit frustrating. My other disappointment about the book was that Anna Leonowens was left out, but I think she was left out of the show, too.

[Jennifer Talarico · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a little bit of a disappointment. It felt more like a coffee table book than a history of women travelers. I shouldn't have been surprised to find that these women were all wealthy and privileged. It makes me wonder about the women travelers who weren't catching the attention of the upper class. The book goes back and forth in time and was a little confusing because of this. It was also repetitive. But it demonstrates how restricted women were in their agency. Few were single women and most were afforded these opportunities because of their husbands.

[Ann Tonks · Rating 3 out of 5]

A 50th Birthday present that's taken me a while to finish. Full of great illustrations and stories but I was irritated by the format with profiles of individuals positioned in the middle of chapters that contained some of the same information.

If you haven't ever explored the world of women travellers, this is a good introduction but a book to dip in and out of rather than one to absorb all at once.