With Passport and Parasol

I will start with the complaint that the font in my edition is ridiculously small, making it harder to read than it needed to be. It is fairly dense reading (in terms of content) so a tiny font with close linespacing makes it so much harder.

What is it? Essentially seven essays on Victorian women travellers, with little in common except the Victorian era and the fact they each pushed boundaries or broke ground in different ways. The downside of seven women being profiled in one book is that they are longer essays than a short story but shorter than a full biography, somehow going further than whetting the appetite but not going so far as to form a full conclusion! Nevertheless it was readable enough (the content, not the font) and had some interesting facts over particularly where the women's autobiographies blurred the lines of truth or glassed over some aspects.

The women in question were:

Emily Eden - Sister of George Eden, Lord Auckland the Governor General of India, covering her travels to India with George.

Anna Leonowens - (of Anna and the King fame) - who was employed to teach the King of Siam's children and wives, and be his personal translator.

Amelia Edwards - Novelist and Journalist who travelled through and wrote about Egypt.

Kate Marsden - Who travelled through Siberia (pre-train tracks) to visit lepers and prisoners and seek to improve their lives.

Gertrude Bell - This one suffered most from the amount Bell achieved in her life, and trying to fit it all in to short essay. She is best known for her travels in the Middle East, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

Daisy Bates - From Ireland to Australia where Bates marriage didn't work out and she found an affinity with the Aboriginal people. She work ed for their benefit and lived with them, sharing their hard way of life, yet still retaining her interactions with the authorities she considered were doing the Aboriginal people harm.

Alexandra David-Neel - The French woman who defied the British who ordered her out of Tibet, then wrote a book in English about her journey to rub it in. He return to penetrated even further into Tibet to visit Lhasa is covered in more detail.

3 stars