The Nine Greatest Women’s Travel and Adventure Books Ever
Badass Women Adventurers Who Defied All of the Odds
The explorations of women have never gotten their proper due, and it’s time that changed. Women have partaken in some of the most spectacular exploratory feats in history. I realized I failed to make that point in my earlier article The 10 Greatest Travel Adventure Books of All Time, terrific as those books are. This article is a small attempt to remedy that shortcoming.
I was reminded of how many great women explorers there are when Cyn and I were traveling on Navimag, a ferry taking us through the wild islands of the Patagonian archipelago on our Vagabond Adventure. I was standing on deck watching the dark blue waters of the Pacific and all of the untamed islands that surrounded us, when I met Maria, a quiet, almost shy, gray-haired women from Germany who now lived in the Netherlands. She had spent the better part of the past year working as a volunteer in Mexico before continuing to travel around South America. While Cyn and I were on our way to Antarctica, Maria was heading to Argentina and then back home. “Have to get to work,” she said with a wan smile.
During the four day trip we talked a lot about the travel books we had read and then after we parted ways, we stayed in touch. Once back in the Netherlands she mentioned she had begun reading about, Ella Maillart, a Swiss woman who - besides competing in skiing and sailing competitions - travelled solo to central Asia in the 1930’s. I had never heard of her. Maybe, I thought, it was time to track down more adventurers like her. When I did, I found phenomenally courageous tales insightfully told in ways that the male, testosterone versions often aren’t (and that’s a good thing).
So here (in no particular order) is a list of The Nine Greatest Women’s Travel and Adventure Books Ever, by or about some of the toughest, strongest most insightful explorers you’ll find. Enjoy and let us know what you think!
Around the World in 72 Days - By Nellie Bly
Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman (born Elizabeth Jane Cochran; May 5, 1864 – January 27, 1922), was better known by her pen name Nellie Bly. When Cochran first walked into Editor George Madden's office at the Pittsburgh Daily Dispatch, he assumed she was there to deliver a message for the writer he had agreed to meet that day. The Dispatch had just printed an editorial arguing women needed to be put in their place and out of the voting booth. Soon afterward someone penned a brilliantly impassioned rebuttal. Madden was so impressed that he placed an ad asking the writer to call on him. It never occurred to him that the small, grey-eyed 18-year old that now confronted him was that writer. Nor did he know that once he hired her she would become one of the most renowned and influential reporters of her time.
Bly specialized in undertaking remarkably difficult assignments. In Pittsburgh her journalism prompted new child labor legislation and she spent six months as a correspondent in Mexico for the Dispatch writing about the customs of common Mexicans and the poverty they dealt with. She returned when Mexico’s dictator Porfirio Diaz threatened to jail her.
In New York, she feigned insanity and had herself committed to the Blackwell Island Insane Asylum for an article she wrote for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. She almost didn’t make it out of the asylum alive. A state investigation and several reforms followed. But she was only warming up. In a muckraking article on Edward R. Phelps, she unveiled the corruption of the Tammany Hall boss for bribing state legislators. And then her own cool testimony during the investigation that followed made her even more famous.
None of this, however, could surpass the feat that made her an international heroine. In 1889 she challenged Jules Verne's fictional global travel record: Around The World in Eighty Days. Not only was the record generally considered unbreakable, but everyone knew that a woman couldn’t possibly mount a respectable challenge. Her luggage alone would make certain of that. But on the morning of November 14, 1889, carrying nothing more than a single carpet bag (with her typewriter inside), she changed all of that and boarded the Augusta Victoria bound for England. 72 days, six hours and 10 minutes later she had outraced the imaginary Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s famous novel. Crowds of New Yorkers hailed her when she docked in New York Harbor. Her name became a household word, and her reputation as the world's greatest reporter was firmly entrenched. She inspired a generation of women adventurers and journalists.
Around the World in 72 Days, the book she wrote about her world-circling journey is captivating. Still a great read. It’s a portrait of a late 19th century world captured by a first rate journalist with a sharp eye and splendid knack for story telling. She even took the time to interview Jules Verne himself. There are descriptions of New York, London, Paris, Suez, Aden, Colombo, Penang, Singapore, Hong Kong, Yokohama, San Francisco, and everything in between all enthusiastically brought to life. The book made Bly famous enough that there were Nellie Bly playing cards, cosmetics and clothing, even a Brooklyn Amusement Park. For a few years she was the world’s most famous woman, and at the height of her popularity was making an unheard of $25,000 a year. The book, of course, was a bestseller, but today you can get the book for free here. And several other examples of her writing and life…
More About Nellie Bly:
Ten Days in a Madhouse - http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bly/madhouse/madhouse.html
Nellie Bly Board Game: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/11652/round-the-world-with-nellie-bly
Audio Version of Around the World in 72 Days: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20975/20975-index.html
Novel: The Mystery of Central Park https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69984
Six Months in Mexico - http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bly/mexico/mexico.html
You can also download Nellie Bly’s book about Blackwell’s: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bly/world/world.html
Forbidden Journey - By Ella Maillart
On February 10, 1903 life gave Ella Maillart the world and for the next 94 years she gave it right back. Our friend Maria, who first told me about Maillart, had it right. She was one of a kind. The daughter of a Swiss father and Danish mother, she grew up a fearless traveler and journalist who covered, literally, some of the toughest territory in the world while writing for the French daily Le Petit Parisien magazine, knocking out 15 books (7 in English), hundred of articles, volumes of photographs and four documentaries.
It’s difficult to say which of Maillart’s books packed more adventure, but Forbidden Journey - From Peking to Kashmir published in 1934 might qualify. Le Petit Parisien sent her to Manchuria to report on the Japanese occupation there. Together with The Times correspondent Peter Fleming, she crossed 3,500 miles through Japanese-occupied China, across the distant province of Sinkiang (present day Turkestan), to Kashmir; some of the most hostile desert and treacherous Himalayan passes in the world. They did it by train and truck, on foot, on horse and camelback, fighting off typhus and bandits as they waded into the civil war between Chinese communists and Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists with pockets full of Mexican money (the currency used in China at the time). They departed in February 1935 and finally returned 7 months later. Maillart’s book recounts the journey.
Maillart encountered and captured a way of life now lost. One that had gone unchanged for centuries. She told tales of missionaries and rogues, parents binding daughters' feet with rags and her cohort Fleming lighting fires under stubborn camels. And she does it with the insightful and unvarnished prose of a veteran reporter. The journey was one of the toughest anyone could tackle, not that Maillart cared. At all times her writing is witty, and she is always-enchanted by the adventure and novelty that sounds her — except when it comes to bureaucrats. She had no time for them. The book is more than a piece excellent journalism, it ’s a portrait of a fascinating woman too, one of many women from the pre-WWII era who ignored convention and revealed lands and people long unknown to the western world.
You can find the book on Amazon, but some feel the printed version is sloppy so you can also borrow it here.
Get a library copy: https://archive.org/details/dli.pahar.2661
Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/Forbidden-Journey-Ella-K-Maillart/dp/144372310X
Across Patagonia - By Lady Florence Dixie
Lady Florence Caroline Dixie (née Douglas) was born May 24, 1855 and though she later gained fame as a war correspondent and children’s author, she proved early in her life she could be as intrepid as any any explorer you could find during that great era of exploration. In 1878 at age 23, she and her husband and two brothers arrived in Ushuaia, Argentina on a spit of land that didn’t even have a proper name in those days.
For the next several months they headed northeast on horseback with a couple of guides to see what they could find. She found plenty - encounters with local natives (now, sadly, all wiped out) that she called Patagonian Indians, wild storms, dangerous predators and the breathtaking beauty and majesty of that part of the world. (I can attest to this because we covered some of the same ground she did.) Her descriptions are among some of the best I’ve read. When they arrived at the Cordilleras, the same mountains we skirted when looking for Butch Cassidy’s ranch, she wrote, “The sun had long set, and the base of the mountains was wrapped in darkness, but their jagged fantastically-shaped crests stood clearly defined against the light which still glimmered in the sky, and here and there a snow-covered peak, higher than its comrades, still retained a faint roseate glow, which contrasted strangely with the gray gloom of all below.”
Unlike many books of that time, she often wrote in an internal monologue of the emotional effect her experiences had on her. She was a staunch feminist even at age 23. Never once does she refer to her husband by name in the book, and the same with her brothers. She could ride and shoot as well as any of the men who joined her on the journey, even the local guides, and never played the role of the weaker sex. In fact, despite being only 5 feet tall, she ran the operation.
Her family were inveterate adventurers and when she was a young woman, her oldest brother (who would have been the 9th Marquess of Queensberry) died after being among the first climbers to summit the Matterhorn. (See our visit to the Matterhorn). Her wealth did make it possible for her to explore the way she did, and sometimes her privilege shows in her occasionally petty complaints about proper food and services. There’s lots of hunting of wild animals that remind you more of chasing foxes in southern England than close encounters with guanaco in the wilds of Patagonia. But they did need to eat while traveling and often fresh game was the only source of food. And in encounters with Patagonia’s now extinct native people, she is never patronizing and never once uses terms like savages which were common at that time. She clearly had enormous respect for all native peoples, and remarkable courage and drive. You can see it all in the book which captures a place and time we would otherwise know very little about.
Available for download on The Gutenberg Project Website: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/42666/pg42666-images.html
Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle - By Dervla Murphy
Some people are born travelers in every sense of the word; open, optimistic, deeply curious and fearless. All of those traits describe Dervia Murphy, Irish writer and traveler who grew up in the little town of Lismore, Ireland and spent much of her life everywhere and anywhere but there. She travelled and wrote for 50 years and remembered at the age of 10 that some day she would peddle on her bike from Lismore to Delhi, India. Over 5000 of the most treacherous and dangerous ground you can find.
Though she was a single child, she grew up with few amenities and spent much of her youth attending to her mother who had contracted rheumatoid arthritis. In the fall of 1963, at the age of 32, after her mother and father’s passing, she departed Ireland for India, plowing through one of Europe’s more memorable and ugly winters. She piloted her Armstrong Cadet men's bicycle into Yugoslavia, on through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and into India’s Punjab and onto Delhi. Her father’s .25 pistol kept both Kurdish bandits in Persia and ravenous wolves in Bulgaria at bay. But she never lost her optimism, developing a life-long affection for Afghanistan and its people. She called herself "Afghanatical." Wherever Murphy travelled all of her life, she never took the luxurious route, bedding down in hostels or with friends or the people she encountered who offered her help along the way.
Murphy’s odyssey to India was only the beginning of her travels. Once in Delhi she worked for Save the Children for several months and remained deeply connected to that organization all of her life. Later her travels and writing included Ethiopia, Tibet, Cameroon, Madagascar, the Balkans, Rwanda and many more. She has the writing and story-telling knack that the Irish are famous for. Her books and articles are frank, entertaining and wonderfully detailed because rather than writing letters she she scribbled extensive notes in her journal almost daily. The result? You’re there with her over every pedaled mile. You want to turn the page because you’re unsure what mishap she’ll encounter next, and there are plenty.
The book is still available on Apple and Amazon and other online stores. You can probably pick it up in many local bookstores or libraries, both brick and mortar as well as online. But wherever you find it, just get it into your hands and under your eyes because it is terrific fun.
Dreams of Trespass, Tales of a Harem Girlhood (US Title)
The Harem Within: Tales of a Moroccan Girlhood (UK Title) - By Fatima Mernissi
Most of the books in this series are non-fiction, but this one is different. It blurs the lines between autobiography and fiction. Either way it reveals an absorbing inside look at the Arab world from the perspective of a young woman growing up in a traditional walled harem in Fez, Morocco during the 1940s and 50s. (For more about Fez read my dispatch about that beautiful city). The book reveals what it was like to be a modern Muslim woman in a place steeped in long tradition as it explores Islam’s views of women, the changes emerging in those perspectives, resistance to French colonialism at the time, and above all Fatima’s emergence as a naive young woman growing into a strong female with thoughtful views on women’s freedom and self-determination, all while surrounded by a male dominated world. Many of the book’s heroines are Fatima’s aunts as well as her mother. The book is charming and entertaining as Fatima unveils the mysteries she experiences in time and place, gender and sex. It illuminates a fascinating and previously unseen world, and eloquently and openly tells this complex story with humor and insight.
Mernissi herself earned a doctorate later in her life at Brandies University in the US but returned to Morocco as an outspoken professor, speaker and author at Mohammed V University. She was largely concerned with Islam and women's roles, analyzing the historical development of Islamic thought and its modern manifestations. Her detailed investigations of the succession to Muhammad cast doubt on the validity of some of the hadith (sayings and traditions attributed to Mohammed, the founder of Islam) that the Muslim faith does not require that women be subjugated. In countries like Morocco this helped reshape traditional views of Islamic women.
Mernissi, unfortunately, died in 2015, but her writing and legacy continue. She was awarded the Erasmus Award in 2004, one of the most prestigious literary awards in Europe.
You can find the book online at Google Books as well’s several other online outlets and libraries.
All the Gear, No Idea - By Michèle Harrison
A woman’s solo motorbike journey around the Indian subcontinent
I first learned about this book when the author, Michéle Harrison, reached out to me because she had come across our Vagabond-Adventure. She told me about her 1997 exploits leaving a very nice job in London to buy a classic Indian Enfield Bullet motorbike she called “Big Thumper,” and make a 17,000 mile circuit around the Indian Subcontinent. It really is wonderfully written, humorous and loaded the sort of adventures you’d expect when traveling a completely unknown country as rich and complex as India, as a single woman.
She admits having no idea how to go about the journey, but just went for it, looking for all the adventure she could get. And she got plenty! As she puts it, “… crashes, dynamite, harassment and hospitality, charity and larceny, disease, enlightenment and a side-trip into the Himalayas.”
The book reminds me of Jupiter’s Travels by Ted Simon, who twice rode a motorcycle around the world, once in his 40s and once in his 70s. It’s one of my favorites. Michele agrees that Simon’s book was an inspiration.
Her telling of her adventure is more humorous and self-deprecating than Simon’s which is more reflective. Michéle’s point is mainly this, “Look if I can do this, anybody can!” I loved the stories of her courage and good humor and her to-hell-with-it determination to handle whatever came her way. She had no back-up support and was entirely alone. As you read the book you’ll find her confidence inspiring. And you see that she herself is further inspired he own journey and the ways it taught her how to attack everything in life ever afterwards. The book was self-published and gets wonderful reviews. I recommend it because not only is it a great story, but like so many travel books it reveals the bounty and courage of the human heart.
In Morocco - By Edith Wharton
Cyndy and I loved Morocco as part of our Vagabond-Adventure and Edith Wharton clearly did too, 100 years ago. You can see it in her travelogue In Morocco, written after she explored the country during World War I. Wharton was a master of the written word and one of the great storytellers of the 20th century.
She was born Edith Jones January 24, 1862 in New York City, a fiercely devoted writer and the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature. She earned it in 1921 with the publication of The Age of Innocence. But that was only one of a bundle of outstanding novels she would write in her life including The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome while hanging with some of the most famous writers and artists of her era — Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, André Gide, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, and Jack London.
Edith was born into wealth and the phrase “keeping up with the Jonses” supposedly refers to her family. She divorced Edward Wharton in 1913 and lived solo the remainder of her life, but continued to travel extensively, and in 1917 published her accounts of her Moroccan experiences.
One of the beauties of this book, and all great travel books, is the way it captures not simply a place but a time as only Wharton can. And in this case an especially exotic place in an especially tumultuous time. She lays out on the page the culture, history, and beauty of a Morocco in the early 20th century, weaving history, anthropology, poetry and art masterfully. Not that the Morocco of today isn’t also exotic, but this book hands you a world you’ll love and savor long after you’ve put it down.
You can find the book here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/in-morocco-edith-wharton/1000277741 as well as most online bookstores.
Gertrude Bell, Desert Queen Gertrude Bell - By Janet Wallach
Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell CBE (14 July 1868 – 12 July 1926) is one of those few people who by the force of her own will and intelligence changed the world. She was the first woman to graduate from Oxford University and then went on to travel the nooks and crannies of the Middle East so thoroughly that she became one of the British Empire’s most trusted experts. She mentored T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), hobnobbed with young Winston Churchill, was close friends with King Faisal, the first King of Iraq and played key roles in shaping the political maps of the Middle East following the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.
Bell wrote prolifically about the region throughout her life, even a translation of Persian poetry, but nothing strictly autobiographical like T. E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I think the story that best captures Bell is Janet Wallach’s biography Desert Queen. When I read it I recalled being floored by this remarkable woman. She was utterly fearless, and traipsed through some of the world’s most forbidding deserts as if she were a born bedouin, first as an archeologist, then historian and finally as a political operative. Before the war she had built such an extensive network of Arab leaders that even in a male dominant world she was chosen to advise on multiple fronts, especially the 1921 Cairo Conference convened by Winston Churchill.
Bell was a great lover of Arab culture and believed that the momentum of Arab nationalism was unstoppable, and advised that the British government should ally with nationalists rather than stand against them. Along with Lawrence, she advocated for independent Arab states in the Middle East after the war, and supported the installation of Hashemite monarchies in what is today Jordan and Iraq.
Afterwards King Faisal made her president of the Baghdad library (the future Iraq National Library), and founded the Iraq Museum as a place to display the country's archaeological treasures. And though an anti-suffragist, she supported education and Iraqi women’s rights while creating Iraq’s antiquities department from the ground up. A remarkable achievement.
Wallach’s book helped bring Bell out of the long shadow of T.E. Lawrence while revealing her childhood, personal relationships (some tragic), her emergence as a trailblazer at Oxford and her remarkable travels through the Middle East, a place little known to the western world at the time. Wallach’s writing is clear and compelling and reveals a woman who was outrageously intelligent and fiercely uncompromising. Not many could have travelled to the places she did or accomplished so much, especially in a Victorian world that saw women as fragile and secondary.
Download her travel book on Syria here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/63731
Desert Queen on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Desert-Queen-Extraordinary-Gertrude-Adventurer/dp/1400096197
Travels With Myself and Another - By Martha Gellhorn
Not many women could tangle with Ernest Hemingway, but Martha Gellhorn, one of the great war time journalists of the 20th century, took him in stride. She not only knew him, but married him, while crossing paths with the likes of Dorothy Parker, Gary Cooper, Eleanor Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-shek. Hemingway is, of course, the unnamed “other” in this book that recalls her many travels and adventures with and without Hemingway, dodging bullets and cannon during World War II, the Spanish Civil and Sino- Japanese Wars, beguiling nearly every man she met while penning some of the best war dispatches written. Her style, like her, is sharp and witty and reveals a tough, brave and wicked smart women, the very template for the dozens of badass female adventurers we’ve seen in so many novels and movies.
From her childhood she was an ardent suffragist who left Bryn Mawr College to become a journalist for United Press in Paris but was fired after reporting sexual harassment at the agency. She covered, it seems, nearly every war the world faced in the middle 20th century, and she didn’t do it from a desk or bar. She was the only woman to land at Normandy on D-Day on 6 June 1944. She was among the first journalists to report from the Dachau concentration camp after it was liberated by U.S. troops on 29 April 1945. Here’s a taste of her sharp tongue from her preface:
“We can't all be Marco, Polo, or Freya Stark, but millions of us are travelers nevertheless. The great travelers, living and dead, are in a class by themselves, unequal professionals. We are amateurs, and though we to have our moments of glory, we are also tired, our spirits sag, we have our moments of ranker. Who has not heard, felt, thought, or said, in the course of a journey, words like: ‘They've lost the luggage again, for God sake?’ ‘You mean we came all this way just to see this?’ ‘Why do they have to make so much damn noise?’ ‘Call that room with a view?’ ‘I’d rather kick his teeth and then give him a tip.’ … But we persevere, and do our best to see the world, and we get around; we go everywhere … the fact is, we cherish our disasters, and here we are one up on the great travelers, who have every impressive qualification for the job, but lack jokes."
Those are the kind of sassy stories you get out of Gellhorn which may explain why in time she and Hemingway’s rather massive ego could not accommodate the shortcomings of their tumultuous marriage.
Travels With Myself and Another is available in e-book, hardcover, paperback and audio versions. Amazon.