`You got married, were an old maid, or went to hell. Take your pick." The uncompromising words of Maud Parrish, a west-coast American who was born in 1878, give a pithy summation of life for women of her era. But Maud wasn't putting up with that. She ran away from an unhappy marriage at the age of 17, ended up in the gold rush town of Nome in Alaska, travelled around the world over a dozen times and even ran a gambling joint in Peking, now Beijing, around the turn of the century. This indomitable gal finally ran out of puff at the age of 98 in 1976.
The sparse but cheerful prose is one of the delights of The Illustrated Virago Book of Women Travellers, a new, picture-filled version of the volume offering excerpts of women's accounts of exotic travel in the past three centuries. It is a taster menu, offering only a portion of a chapter of accounts of life everywhere from Nome to Qum, in Iran. Nice to browse through, although I will be keen to read more of Maud and several of the other lesser-known authors, if bookstores or the Internet can provide.
Western civilisation's list of great women travellers is about as long as that of great women painters: neither calling meshed well with the required dedication to home and family that was a feature of western society (and eastern, probably) until recently. Yet, as with the art world, there have been daring and significant women travellers for several hundred years. With a faithful servant or two in tow, they hitched up their skirts, packed the myriad essentials of an earlier age, and set off into the sunset on boat and train. Sometimes their achievements were extraordinary - read Alexandra David-Neel's account of travels in virgin territory in the snowy wastes of Tibet, with only a cup of buttered tea (bleah) to cheer her up, and you will see how tough some of these people were.
Karen Blixen is here, of course, as are Rebecca West, Freya Stark, Gertrude Bell and those better known as novelists, such as Edith Wharton, Joan Didion and Mary McCarthy. The many difficulties, both practical and psychological, that women faced when trying to mount expeditions - or even horses - are glimpsed, as with the splendidly-named Ethel Brilliana Tweedie, in her account of the opposition to her riding a horse astride and not side-saddle in her equestrian adventures at the turn of the century. "The peace of families was temporarily wrecked - for people were of course divided in their opinions - and bitter things were said by both sides concerning a very simple and harmless matter," Mrs Tweedie reported tranquilly. For a women who had lost father, husband, and then both sons in war, the question of astride or side-saddle must indeed have seemed trivial. She was victorious in Iceland, but the trail she blazed closed up again subsequently, although these days we even see royal princesses riding "as a man". Incidentally, I was pleased to note that among Mrs Tweedie's many published works was one entitled Danish versus English Butter-Making. A lady of diverse interests, indeed.
Willa Cather's description of Lavandou in the south of France in 1902 as a place which possessed the gift of happiness, with its bowl of blue sky and scent of lavender, is gloriously evocative, as is Freya Stark on the Arab peasant whose face had "none of those small wrinkles produced by thought". There are many delicious snacks, but it is a smorgasbord, not a meal.
The pictures in the book, which is coffee table in size and layout, are attractive, but an annoying feature is that their subjects are not identified, not even in the list of attributions at the back of the book. The photograph of the bridge at Mostar in Bosnia, beside Rebecca West's marvellous words about the place, is self-evident, but a lot of the pictures are generic rather than specific. So a lovely kaleidoscope of what I presume are Tibetan parade flags next to Alexandra David-Neel's account of her travels there in the last century is not given any provenance. In a book about identifying unknown places this is an unfortunate omission.
Angela Long is an Irish Times journalist