Letters to Henrietta
"Before her first journey, no one would have guessed that Isabella Bird would become the heroine of Victorian travel. A middle-aged spinster on the Isle of Mull, she suffered from 'neuralgia ... pain in my bones, pricking like pins and needles in my limbs, excruciating nervousness, exhaustion, inflamed eyes, sore throat, swelling of the gland behind each ear, stupidity'. She was too frail to hold up her head without a steel support, and could barely stomach broth. Nonplussed, her doctors packed her off to the Pacific, the antipodean version of the spas of Switzerland, hoping for a cure." "Once there, her transformation was dramatic. Suddenly in Hawaii she could climb the world's highest volcano - and was the first woman to do so; she rode an elephant through the untravelled jungles of Perak; she arrived in Hong Kong just in time to see it burn; and in Colorado she fell in love with a one-eyed desperado called Rocky Mountain Jim. But whenever she came home to Scotland, her illness returned, making another trip essential." "Ultimately, she became a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (another female first), advised Gladstone on the issue of Armenian Christians, and was presented to Queen Victoria in 1893. She also became the mistress of her own mythology, insisting that her books reproduced her letters without emendation, which was far from true. This selection, never before published, contains lengthy excerpts from her first two world tours: to Australia, Hawaii and Colorado in 1872-3; and to Japan, China, Singapore and Malaya in 1878-9. The Isabella Bird they reveal is not the one we thought we knew but instead tempestuous, self-obsessed, occasionally at odds with the idea of Empire, deflecting marriage proposals right and left. The letters also throw light on a fascinating relationship with Henrietta, the equally clever and curious sister who had to stay behind."--BOOK JACKET.
