This grand beyond: The travels of Isabella Bird Bishop

Isabella Bird Bishop was born in 1831. At the age of forty she rejected the conventional, pious and benevolent life of a cleric's daughter and Victorian gentlewoman in favor of the romance of travel, hardship and danger in some of the remotest regions of the world. No place was too distant or too hazardous; on foot, horseback, yak and elephant she visited the frontiersmen of the American West, the Rocky Mountains, the Sandwich Islands, the 'hairy Ainu' of northern Japan, the forbidden cities of Tibet, Persia and Kurdistan, Korea, the Malay Peninsula; she made a perilous journey up the Yangtze River and set out on a last romantic ride in the Atlas Mountains. The Far East had a special attraction and many of the places she saw had only recently been opened to foreigners. Isabella Bird Bishop's ability to relate to peoples of all races and cultures was combined with formidable powers of endurance: neither floods nor tigers, corrupt officials or local hostility, extremes of climate, jungle or mountain terrain ever stood in her way. She married Dr John Bishop at fifty but when he died after five happy but travel-free years, she paused only to take a brief nursing course before setting off for Tibet. She published nine books about her travels, all of them bestsellers in their time, and all represented in this anthology. The profits from her writings were plowed into a variety of charitable causes in England and Scotland. Her life and writings, she declared, 'vindicated the right of a woman to do anything which she can do well'. This Grand Beyond shows Isabella at her best. A geographer of repute with excellent descriptive abilities, her writing is at once exact and dramatic, humorous and eloquent, and guaranteed to create an appetite for adventure and faraway places.