The history of travel writing has long been dominated by men. From Herodotus to Ibn Battuta, from Marco Polo to Captain Cook, the great travel narratives were, for centuries, written by men whose journeys were possible because they were male — they could move through the world with a freedom that women of the same period could not claim. And yet, alongside this male tradition, there is another one: a remarkable and often overlooked body of travel literature written by women who not only went where few women had gone before, but wrote about it with originality, humour, and a sharpness of observation that rivals anything in the canon.
These women were not tourists. They were explorers, ethnographers, naturalists, and spies who travelled to West Africa, the Himalayas, the Arabian desert, the Amazon, the Pacific Islands — often alone, often in poor health, often on remarkably small budgets. And they wrote books that are still vivid, surprising, and culturally valuable more than a century later.
Isabella Bird: The Invalid Who Outwalked Everyone
Isabella Bird is perhaps the most improbable traveller in the history of the genre. Born in 1831, she suffered from chronic spinal pain, depression, and what her doctors vaguely called "nervous disorders." Her prescribed cure — in a piece of Victorian medical advice that now seems almost satirical — was to travel. And so she did, producing a body of work that includes The Hawaiian Archipelago (1875), A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879), and The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (1899).
Bird's books are remarkable for their sheer physical energy. She rode horses across the Rockies in winter, climbed volcanoes in Hawaii, and travelled through the interior of Japan and China when few Westerners of any gender had seen those regions. Her prose is precise, unsentimental, and often wryly funny. In A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains, she describes sharing a cabin with a one-eyed outlaw named Rocky Mountain Jim, whose reputation for violence was matched only by his hospitality. She writes about him not as a Victorian lady startled by rough company, but as a shrewd observer of a man living outside the law.
"I have found a very pleasant home," Bird wrote from the Rockies, "in a log cabin with a desperado."
Bird's achievement is not just that she travelled widely. It is that she wrote about the people she met — settlers, Native Americans, Chinese labourers, Hawaiian royalty — without the condescension that marred so much Victorian travel writing. She was curious, not superior. She listened. And she understood that the best travel writing is never really about the places. It is about the encounters.
Mary Kingsley: The Trader's Niece in West Africa
Mary Kingsley is one of the most original figures in English letters. She was thirty years old when her parents died within weeks of each other, leaving her free for the first time in her life. With no formal education, no money, and no connections, she decided to travel to West Africa — a region known to Europeans primarily for its reputation as "the White Man's Grave." Her book Travels in West Africa (1897) is an extraordinary document: part travelogue, part natural history, part ethnography, and part comedy.
Kingsley travelled through what is now Gabon, Cameroon, and Nigeria, often with only local guides, through mangrove swamps and tropical forests that few Europeans had ever seen. She collected fish specimens for the British Museum (several species were named after her), traded with local merchants, and survived encounters with crocodiles, hippopotamuses, and a leopard that appeared in her hut one night. She wrote about all of it with a deadpan wit that is still startling.
"It is an awful thing to be a naturalist," she wrote after falling into a game trap set with sharpened stakes, "when you fall into a game pit at night, the first thing you do is to feel if any bones are broken. The second is to look round and see if there is a dead elephant at the bottom. Not finding one, you are vexed. Then you look up and see the stars. And you think how many of them have a right to be where the naturalist is, and she has not."
Kingsley was also a fierce critic of colonial administration. Her books argued — controversially for her time — that African societies should not be forced into European molds, that indigenous legal systems and trade practices had their own logic, and that the British colonial project was doing more harm than good. She was not an activist in the modern sense. She was a witness who refused to lie about what she saw.
Gertrude Bell: The Uncrowned Queen of Iraq
Gertrude Bell is best known today as a political figure — the woman who helped draw the borders of modern Iraq after World War I, advised Winston Churchill, and founded the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. But before she became a diplomat and intelligence officer, Bell was a travel writer of remarkable skill. Her books The Desert and the Sown (1907) and Amurath to Amurath (1911) are accounts of her journeys through the Ottoman Empire, across the Syrian desert, and into Mesopotamia.
Bell travelled through regions that were politically volatile even then, crossing the desert by camel and horse with small caravans of local guides. She wrote in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian, and her knowledge of tribal politics was so deep that local leaders would ask her to mediate disputes. Her travel writing captures a world on the brink of transformation — the Ottoman Empire was collapsing, the European powers were carving up the Middle East, and the peoples of the region were navigating changes they could not control.
What makes Bell's travel writing so valuable, beyond its historical importance, is the quality of her attention. She noticed everything: the way a Bedouin camp was organized, the pattern of a carpet in a desert tent, the political implications of a tribal leader's hospitality. Her books are not adventure stories. They are the work of a mind trained to observe power and place simultaneously, written by a woman who understood that the personal and the political were never separate.
Freya Stark: The Last Romantic Traveller
Freya Stark is often described as the greatest woman travel writer of the twentieth century, and the description is not an exaggeration. Born in Paris to British parents in 1893, she taught herself Arabic, learned to navigate by the stars, and spent much of her adult life travelling through the Middle East — through Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and the Hadhramaut — often alone, often in extreme conditions, always writing with a blend of erudition and charm that is almost impossible to resist.
Stark's masterpiece is The Valleys of the Assassins (1934), an account of her journey through the remote mountain valleys of western Iran to find the lost fortresses of the Hashshashin — the medieval Ismaili sect that gave us the word "assassin." The book is part adventure story, part historical detective work, part meditation on the art of travel itself. Stark writes about the fear of being lost in unknown mountains, the kindness of strangers, the strange beauty of landscapes so barren they seem not to belong to the same planet as the green fields of England.
But Stark is perhaps best read in her letters, which were published in multiple volumes and are among the finest correspondence in English. She wrote to her mother from every stage of her journeys, and those letters capture something that her finished books sometimes polished away: the uncertainty, the loneliness, the sheer physical difficulty of being a woman alone in places where women were not supposed to be alone.
"I do not think I am afraid of being killed," she wrote from the mountains of Iran. "But I am afraid of being afraid."
What These Writers Share
What unites these women — Bird, Kingsley, Bell, Stark, and others like Marianne North, Dame Rose Macaulay, Dervla Murphy — is not just bravery or curiosity, though both are present in abundance. What unites them is a refusal to accept that the world of travel and discovery was a male domain. They did not argue for this refusal. They simply acted on it, and then wrote about what they found.
Their books remain important not only as historical documents but as models of travel writing at its best: alive to landscape, respectful of people, suspicious of power, and driven by a genuine desire to understand rather than to conquer. In an era when travel has become cheap and easy but travel writing has often become thin — the airport lounge, the boutique hotel, the carefully curated Instagram moment — the books of these women remind us what the genre can be when it is taken seriously. Travel is not a vacation. It is an education, undertaken at risk, and the writing it produces should be worthy of the risk.
Where to Start
- Isabella Bird, A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains — the best introduction to Victorian women's travel writing: vivid, funny, and utterly unpretentious.
- Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa — one of the strangest and most original books of the nineteenth century. Her voice is unlike any other.
- Gertrude Bell, The Desert and the Sown — travel writing that is also political analysis, written by a woman who helped shape the modern Middle East.
- Freya Stark, The Valleys of the Assassins — the great twentieth-century travel book about the Middle East. Read it before you read anything else about Iran.
- Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle — the modern heir to this tradition, written in 1965 and still one of the best travel books ever published by anyone.