British explorer and professional travel writer Isabella Bird is, to the modern eye, a study in contradictions. One of the premier mountaineers and world explorers of her generation, she was, in 1892, the first woman elected to London's Royal Geographic Society. And yet Bird's books on her travels are filled with depictions of herself and other women that reinforce the "properly feminine" domestic and behavioral codes of her day.
In this fascinating and highly original collection of essays, Karen Morin explores the self-expression of travel writers like Bird by giving geographic context to their work. With a rare degree of clarity the author examines relationships among nineteenth-century American expansionism, discourses about gender, and writings of women who traveled and lived in the American West in the late nineteenth century--British travelers, American journalists, a Native American tribal leader, and female naturalists. Drawing from a rich diversity of primary