Spinsters Abroad

by Dea Birkett

What spurred so many Victorian women to leave behind the security and comfort of their middle-class homes to undertake perilous journeys of thousands of miles? This book draws on the diaries, letters and other writings of more than 50 such women to describe their experiences and aspirations.

Genres: History, Travel, Nonfiction, Adventure, Victorian, Womens, Cultural

Paperback

First published June 1, 1989

Reviews

[Nancy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had such high hopes for this book! Because, what's not to like? Victorian spinsters chucking their restricted lives of drudgery to their pompous menfolk, hitching up their skirts (or swapping them for scandalous divided skirts and stout boots!) and going off to visit Egypt...or Persia...or Samarkand! It sounded marvelous, and had the added fillip of being TRUE. These were real women, fascinating women, and some of them left a pretty solid mark on the world - we're still feeling the effects (in Iraq) of Gertrude Bell's machinations.

So why two stars? Because Dea Birkett took these wildly individualistic women and reduced them to shared characteristics. This book reads like a doctoral dissertation, more concerned with pie charts than personalities. (She didn't actually use pie charts, but you know the sort of thing: 90% celebrated Christmas, even in the jungle; 100% left their complexions unprotected.) Like, Gertrude Bell? On her first journey to Persia, at age 26, she fell madly in love with some young military dude; they read poetry and made love in fantastic Persian gardens; she was forced to come home, and he died of pneumonia before she could get back. THAT IS A SOAP OPERA, Dea Birkett! There is so much STORY there! But Birkett just tells the bare bones of the story, and practically in the next paragraph, we hear that Amelia Edwards (wait, how did we get to her?) found the physical terrain of the Dolomites less interesting than the terrain of the Orient.

And that, I guess, is my major gripe. Birkett talks so much about shared characteristics that these women all begin to run together in your mind. Are we talking about Mary Gaunt, or Mary Kingsley? Edith Durham, or Amelia Edwards? Do you care? Ultimately, I didn't. Boo.

[Donna · Rating 1 out of 5]

I loved the idea of reading a book about female explorers in the Victorian era, but the title put me on guard from the start. Using a charged word like "spinsters" seemed judgmental and a little unkind (and in some cases, inaccurate). I figured that it was just meant to be eye-catching and cute, but I should have gone with my instincts.

It's clear that the author did a lot of detailed research about her subjects, but she doesn't share it in a way that's effective or memorable. The book begins with a rush of biographical information, names, places, dates, and locations, but it's all written up in a dry style that leaves us with an overall picture of a typical female explorer rather than characterizing the women under discussion. When the same names would come up again later, I could never remember who was the Australian writer and who attended Oxford. I suppose that didn't matter, since the disjointed narrative never stayed with one woman long enough for the reader to get to know her.

I forgave the awkwardness of the beginning, because maybe there wasn't a great way to introduce us to the many people we'd be reading more about. But even once I started in about the journeys, the book didn't get better. I was practically begging this book to really dig into the adventure, drama, social custom, and privilege of these lives, but it expanded on its topics only in a dull, general way. These "Victorian Lady Explorers" should have seemed larger than life, instead they're squashed down into categories and examples that deny them their individuality.

I want to read more books about the subject, but I couldn't stomach more than half of this one.

[QNPoohBear · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up because some of the Victorian lady explorers inspired my favorite literary characters. Amelia Edwards traveled along the Nile and her writings inspired Amelia Peabody Crocodile on the Sandbank; Margaret Fountaine's butterfly collecting expeditions inspired Veronica Speedwell A Curious Beginning and also Merula The Butterfly Conspiracy. Even though Amelia hates Gertrude Bell, I see a lot of the real life Middle Eastern explorer in Amelia. I also see the influence of Edith Durham, who traveled to Albania with nursing skills and doctored the locals.

Like Amelia, these women were spinsters, widows or married but mostly in name only and middle aged. They were NOT 20-somethings like Veronica Speedwell. They spent their youth dutifully caring for ill and tyrannical family members. In middle age they finally became free and in freedom from family duties, they found freedom to be free spirited, be themselves and to do something special. While none of these women were the first Europeans or first women anywhere they went, the women largely preferred to travel outside of European colonies and explore places European women were kept away from/chose to stay away from. In doing so, they felt independent and free from the restrictions of Victorian life.

This book is arranged thematically rather than chronologically or by woman. I had a hard time following it at first and kept having to look back at the biographies of the women to remember who was who. Their experiences cover a wide range of time and territory. It seems funny to think of the Rocky Mountains as some place new and exciting to visit. Hawaii was populated by mainly natives. Only a handful of non-native missionaries lived in the Sandwich Islands, as they were called then. Other women explored Africa, Asia, the Americas and one sneaked into Lhasa, Tibet. The excerpts from diaries, letters, published works and manuscripts reveal a fascinating look at the travels of Victorian British women.

Even though this book is old, the author acknowledges the contradictions of white Victorian women traveling in mostly non-white countries. I was disappointed to read how their travels actually promoted imperialistic viewpoints. The women claimed they were travelling solo but what they actually meant was they were travelling unaccompanied by family members and other British explorers. The women tended to romanticize the past and forced their narratives to suit their ideals. Some of them women I can make allowances for, given the time period, but others had to have known they were racist and imperialist. Even Isabella Bird, traveling in the Rocky Mountains, was charmed by "Rocky Mountain Jim", a man she felt represented a link to the past. She romanticized the outlaw as a hero in her mind and a figure of romance. Mary Kingsley, on the surface, sounds more modern with her opinionated opposition to European imperialism and championing the rights of indigenous people. However, her motivation was racist and romanticized.

One woman I actually liked was Marianne North, a biologist and botanical artist who discovered new plants and created the gallery at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. I saw a documentary on her and it made me want to visit Kew. Her drawings were extraordinary and her accomplishments remarkable. She was one of the few women who didn't infantilize or romanticize native cultures. She really only cared about plants.

I was surprised to learn how none of the women profiled in this book ever met or wanted to meet. I expected them to be early modern feminists, a sisterhood of women daring to step outside their proscribed sphere. In actuality, the women saw themselves as independent and more masculine than feminine. They thought of themselves as unique and special and to know someone else who did something similar kind of diminished their accomplishments in their minds.

When the women returned home to England they eschewed the women's suffrage cause, denied they were extraordinary and turned their noses up at the idea of being anything other than traditional and feminine. The women who were the most adventurous abroad became the most conservative at home. Some wanted memberships to professional associations and others downplayed it like their accomplishments were no big deal and they were just NOT professionals. The suffragettes were considered too brash and bold, unfeminine and trying to overpower men. I imagine it must have been difficult for them to walk a tightrope of wanting to be acclaimed for their successes and trying to appear like conventional ladies. This chapter was very sad.

The final chapter deals with the end of their lives. While Gertrude Bell died nursing in South Africa, she dreamed of going back farther inland where she was happiest. Marianne North focused on her gallery at the expense of her health and reputation and Isabella Bird's already precarious health became worse. Ella Christie was lost without her sister and confidant, Alice and became miserly and mean before her death of leukemia. This section is also very sad. I wonder what these women would make of their legacies today?

This book is still relevant for women's studies, studying the feminine impact on Empire, armchair traveling and anyone with an interest in Victorian women. I wish I had read this when I was in graduate school. I would like an updated version with links to websites of places to visit like Kew Gardens and if any of their papers have been digitized or digitized finding aids.

A partial list of the women featured in this book:

Isabella Lucy Bird
Edith Durham Photo collection
Gertrude Bell The Gertrude Bell Society, The Gertrude Bell Project
Alexandra David-Néel
Marianne North Visit the gallery (when there is not a pandemic) or buy prints Margaret Fountaine Scientist of the day
Alice Christie
Amelia Edwards Read her book A Thousand Miles Up the Nile
Beatrix Bulstrode

[Gwynneth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spinsters Abroad (was this a deliberate pun?) highlights the interesting phenomena of single women travelers born in the time of circumscribed Victorianism.

More specifically, these women were not those traveling to Europe or America with suitable companions. These women were spinsters, maiden aunts who were expected by society to self-sacrifice either for the aging parents or for a married sibling, all in the name of propriety. Marching off to the depths of Africa or Central Asia by one's self was certainly not an option at this time.

However, the author has researched the journals of approximately 50 women living in Victorian times who managed to do just that. By culling through the women's diaries, Birkett brings to life the varied feelings of excitement, adventure, loneliness, and the overall struggle for family/societal acceptance of their choices. Many of the women turned their travels toward scientific purposes to be taken more seriously. These purposes could include anything from detailed botanical paintings, stuffed animal specimens or geographical mapping of unexplored rivers.

Birkett also brings to light the conflicted feelings prevalent at the time toward owning one's femininity, claiming the right of free travel, yet denying any connection to the pejorative title of "suffragists".

And interestingly enough, these same women who wrestled with these inner conflicts while carving a place in male travel societies, could not resist employing their own strain of sexism against other women following in their footsteps.

[Darla Ebert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Evocative. Although I admire the time periods from which these women hailed (Victorian, Edwardian) still the author makes clear the immoveable obstacles faced by single women of the aforementioned eras. The one way to surmount the problems of a woman, especially that of an unmarried woman, was to travel alone. The enormous barriers for women were that of having virtually no identity except through that of her husband, if married, of her father if unmarried, her brother(s) if the father had died. Women were hidden away and forced to work exclusively within the home. A traveling woman was relatively safe during those years and could carve out an identity that, before, she could only dream (of).

[Natalie Kaufman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Badass women explorers from the 1800’s? Yes please. An absolute inspiration and wonderful reminder of how dumb it is when men tell us to stay indoors. 4/5 for making a mockery of patriarchy and showing it doesn’t matter what century it is, women know best. Also a doctor prescribed one of these “unmarried twenty-three year olds a voyage to cure her mental health and restlessness”, can I get that too?

[Fran Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author researched diaries and letters of 50 women who left their comfortable homes to travel exotic journies to far places. They were independant in these far off countries unlike their previous homes. They often had troubled early lives but found in traveling both mental and physical freedom.

[Kristen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This review says it better than I could. I had to force myself to finish it.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Kate · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

"What spurred so many Victorian women to leave behind the security and comfort of their middle-class homes to undertake perilous journeys of thousands of miles, tramping through rain forests, caravaning across deserts, and scaling mountain ranges? How were they able to travel so freely in exotic lands, when in their own countries such independence was denied them?

"Dea Birkett delves into the diaries and letters of fifty such women and discovers troubled and unconventional lives. The cozy image of a maiden aunt prodding a path through the jungle with a parasol is replaced by a more complex portrait. Many of the journeys are examined, including Mary Gaunt's safari in a hammock along the West African coast, Gertrude Bell's Middle Eastern archaeological excursions, Mary Kingsley's pioneering trek through tropical Gabon, Amelia Edward's thousand-mile passage in a dahabeeyah up the Nile, and Isabella Bird's grueling ascent of the Rocky Mountains. As Birkett explains, these travels were more than just a chance for these women to see interesting and exotic places; they were a chance for them to see what it meant to be alone, and away from societal conventions. These inveterate and courageous, yet often conflicted, travelers found that being on the move meant mental as well as physical freedom."

This was a well-written, well researched book, which thoroughly and expertly presented the aspects of Victorian society which drove these women to take up dangerous traveling. The book also delved into the mind sets of these women, and the conflicts that naturally arose beause of their choice of how to escape the restrictions of that society.

However, from the title of the book, I had expected to read about their actual expeditions -- what they saw, the cultures they found and how they reacted to them, the joys and rigors of the travel itself, etc. This book offered only glimpses of the journeys themselves, and tht disappointed me.

[Sara W · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked the idea of this subject matter, but the book didn't end up being what I expected (or ultimately what I wanted). I wanted to get a feel for the women explorers as individuals (and a feel for the locations where they travelled), but that was almost impossible based on how this book was set up. I felt like I was reading a dissertation or thesis. The book was arranged into chapters according to the stages of life of the women explorers in general. For example, the first chapter was about how their lives were before they travelled, then there were chapters about the actual travel, then chapters about their return home, and eventually a chapter about their deaths. The problem with this was you could never get a feel for an individual woman or the location she travelled to. The author would make a general statement at the beginning of a paragraph (the women explorers took care of family members prior to travelling), and then refer to two or three of the women's experiences to support her statement (Mary took care of her invalid father before travelling to the Congo; Susan took care of a sick sister before travelling to Albania). It got to the point where I was only reading the first sentence of each paragraph because the tiny, sporatic glimpses into the women's individual lives just weren't worth reading because I couldn't keep track of all of them. There was a small biography section at the end of the book that provided a paragraph on each individual woman which ended up being more interesting than the book itself.

[Jane Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let's state at the outset that not all the women featured in the book were spinsters. Some were widowed or still married. Birkett brings together those women who upped sticks and went exploring in foreign parts, mostly in the late 19th century. Some I knew about; I'd read a biography of Gertrude Bell, for instance. The format is awkward at first. Birkett is concerned with the stages of life of these women, chapter by chapter, and the reader loses a sense of who is being talked about, of who went where. But as the book goes on it works better. The similarities in attitudes, as well as the differences, were brought out. There were some interesting chapters on how the explorers regarded the natives of the countries they were travelling in and what happened to them when they got home.

['stina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved this collection of stories about lady adventurers. I've always had a fascination with them, stemming from childhood. It's a little difficult to keep everyone's names straight, and the author tends to jump from explorer to exploer in order to make her point. These explorers were wandering the earth in a good 75 year time frame so sometimes it's hard to keep track of who was where, when.

[Teressa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've just started reading, but am not out of the first chapter yet, and already a little dismayed at the what I perceived to be the author's dislike of men. Once further into the book, I hope that my initial reaction to the first few pages can be revised with a more positive comment.

The bibliography is an excellent source to locate first hand source material, and no matter the rest of the book, it will be a treasured volume if for that alone.

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Juicy subject matter, but rather dull read unfortunately. Dea Birkett has tried to write about the lives of a range of Victorian women explorers and travellers but they all get too jumbled in her laudable attempt to look at themes. Even the themes are, sadly, unsuccessfully drawn out. The book is somehow not even much about their travels.

However, it was interesting to see the contrasts and contradictions in these women and in particular what seems to have been a majority anti-feminism.

[Sarah Harkness · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book frustrated me. It seems to have been poorly proof-read, in the edition I had, and some of the author's prose is very hard to disentangle, and some of it is just badly written. Also, I got all the women hopelessly muddled up, because of the way it has been structured...but hidden among the text there are some nuggets of fascinating information and research...

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favorite travel books, ever! I read this several years ago and plan to re-read it soon. I loved the stories of these bold, strong-minded women and their journeys to exotic places at a time when the world seemed so very large, and even dangerous.

[Rebecca Kilby Vannette]

More about the social and political context of these women's travels than a overview of their journeys and explorations.

"Of course they thought her mad, and respected her accordingly" -Marianne North, 1893

[Antoinette · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intersting topic, just not very well written.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating insight into the lives of women who broke social conventions, and went out to do things their way.