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Chapter 8 This chapter discusses the complex strategies, from transposition of the home space to aesthetic discourse, used by women travel writers to access the Oriental space while avoiding censure. It begins with Isabella Bird’s depiction of ‘embryonic’ spaces in the American Wild West, precursors to the unbeaten tracks she pursues in her Oriental travelogues. It then analyses the overlaying of exotic with domestic space in the work of both Bird and Gertrude Bell. The second section examines how constructions of the female and native body disrupt the textual formulation of the Orient, from Bird’s feminisation of the Korean landscape, painting rather than planting her flag of conquest, to Isabelle Eberhardt’s conflation of the female body and colonial space in Algeria. The final section considers the lure of the desert, its opposition to the topos of the harem, and the potential it offers for a textual ‘third space’.

This chapter weaves together the stories of the Earl of Dunraven and the travel writer Isabella Bird, tracing them to Estes Park, Colorado. Although Dunraven perceived the West as a space in which he could play out childhood dreams of adventure and escape the tumult that beset his native Ireland, others defined western space differently. The chapter reveals that in 1873, even as Dunraven and his agents were acquiring land in Estes Park, his compatriot Isabella Bird spent several months in the valley. The book Isabella Bird published based on her letters home, A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains, turns a searching eye on her fellow Britons, particularly on their performance of masculinity. The chapter finds that both she and Dunraven wrote Estes Park into their narratives of imperial self-fashioning. Their choices affected local residents in varied ways, distributing new kinds of power through the community and shaping its future.

This chapter examines the political implications of the revisions made to Unbeaten Tracks in Japan by Isabella Bird. The idealization of the Ainu people, the culminating northern point of her journey, consigns them to historical defeat, victims of the racial struggle for existence. In particular, it investigates how editorial changes alter the character of the traveler. It also shows how representations of Japan are accordingly modified. Finally, it reviews the most conspicuous difference between the two editions — the erasing of most of the references to missionary activities in Japan. Perhaps the act of travel writing is itself an effort to redefine identity, which contact with the other destabilizes to some extent. If this is the case, differences between the first and the popular editions of Unbeaten Tracks in Japan cast an interesting light upon the ways in which cultural boundaries are redrawn in the process of recounting travel.

This chapter examines representations of Malaya in the writings of Isabella Bird, Emily Innes, and Florence Caddy, British writers who were in Malaya for different periods of time between 1879 and 1888. It provides a reading of their works as discourses of differences that reinforce colonialist attitudes about Malaya and its people. It suggests that the works of these women are a response to the condition of being not-at-home in that there is an attempt to create through their writings an environment that is hospitable to the colonial enterprise, even if the voices are different.

This chapter explores both resemblances and divergences within Isabella Bird's The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither (1883), Emily Innes' The Chersonese with the Gilding Off (1885), and Florence Caddy's To Siam and Malaya in the Duke of Sutherland's Yacht “Sans Peur” (1889). These are narratives written by three very different women who were in Malaya under varied circumstances. It specifically analyzes the extent to which their works conform to the idea that women's travel writings might be considered as constituting “discourses of difference”. It also makes the point that, apart from gender, there are other internal distinctions to be made within the “discourses of difference”. These include differences in terms of class, marital status and the particular circumstances that brought these women to Malaya. In general, the three accounts of British presence in Malaya reveal the variety of ways in which colonialism is articulated by women writers who were in Malaya between 1879 and 1888.

This chapter looks at women travelers in China between the late 1870s and the early 1920s. It specifically determines a first generation of women's travel in China exemplified in Isabella Bird's The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (1899) and Constance Gordon Cumming's Wanderings in China (1888). It also poses the question of whether their journeys served as more prescriptive itineraries for later women travelers and, in fact, established the frameworks of what is called a Grand Tour of China. It starts by reviewing Bird's and Cumming's travel routes. It then introduces Eliza Scidmore's travel guide and finally moves into a discussion of how the second generation of female travelers describes the most prominent travel destination on their Grand Tour of China — the capital Beijing — between 1900 and 1924. The accounts of pioneering British women led to the more systematic travel itineraries of succeeding American women. Traveling educated not only the mind but also the senses and feelings, as the recurring encounters with Chinese women show.

Illustrated papers were not only crucial for imaging women’s bodies and identities but also for depicting other cultures, often through an imperialist lens. As Andrea Kaston Tange notes in this essay, weeklies such as the Illustrated London News responded to the opening up of Japan after 1854 with illustrations ‘that tended to draw more heavily on tropes that depicted a country that was artistically very fine in part because it was simultaneously woefully behind in modern technologies’ (p. 273). To some degree, Isabella Bird (1831‒1904), in her travel narrative Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880), reiterates these Orientalist strategies, yet she also, through letterpress descriptions and visual representations, balanced ‘fairyland’ imagery with realist detail that defies stereotypes and self-reflexively draws attention to her own status as a foreign spectacle. Tange’s essay challenges us to view women writers’ relationship to the colonialist discourse of illustrated journalism in complex terms, as a ‘series of layered registers, a palimpsest of meaning’ (p. 273).

The essays in this book continually negotiate the vexed question of how far it is possible to transpose generic norms and developmental sequences based on European travelogue, whose multiple variants include pilgrimage, voyage literature, Grand Tour, natural history, and picturesque sightseeing, and whose participants include colonial administrator, journalist-spy, and postmodern pasticheur. An overview of the chapters included in this book is shown. Topics covered include trade missions to China, the travels of Isabella Bird in China, Japan and Southeast Asia, confounding the imperial gaze in Southeast Asia, an odd couple in East Asia, and travels in and out of Japan. The essays are unified geographically and historically, but are not governed by a single overarching thesis. However, they do share the emphasis of newer imperial history on cultural dispersal, multiple sources, and resistance to teleological narratives of empire.

This chapter demonstrates that the New World wilderness had a romantic as well as a pragmatic appeal; as the Highland clans became tamed and their landscape commercialised, the call of the American wild was heard in Scotland. Among those who responded were William Drummond Stewart, Charles Augustus Murray and James Carnegie, who all relished the potential for adventure, the opportunities for hunting, and the elemental challenge of encountering wild animals and wild people. The chapter discusses the self-mythologising accounts of their experiences by Stewart, Murray and Carnegie, and texts relating to more modest travellers, such as Isabella Bird who followed the frontier west and relished wilderness for its own sake, and for its wildlife and potential for solitude - the latter a theme explored more fully in the final chapter. David Douglas, botanist and plant collector in the Pacific northwest, represents another aspect of response to the ‘glorious world’ of the wilderness.