This is a selection of the original letters written in the 1870s by the Victorian globe-trotter, Isabella Bird, to her younger sister, Henrietta on the Isle of Mull. They were posted from the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, China and the Malay Peninsula. Henrietta edited them, it is thought heavily, and on her brief spells at home Isabella added to them and prepared them for publication by the great travel publisher, John Murray. They all turned into best-selling travel books.
Henrietta must have worked hard. The letters lie in their hundreds in the Murray archive, and elsewhere, travel-stained, torn, ill-spelt and ungrammatica, written at obvious speed from the craters of volcanoes and beside thundering rivers which Isabella had crossed clinging to her horse, and once clinging to the back of a swimming elephant. The handwriting is difficult and crossed on the page.
The blurb on this well-presented book – good map, notes and fascinating photographs – says that there is here revealed a different Isabella from the accepted stately traveller, very much the ‘Lady’ in the Rocky Mountains, the title of her most popular excursion.
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