Unsuitable for Ladies

Book excerpt: Real ladies do not travel - or so it was once said. This collection of women's travel writing dispels the notion by showing how there are few corners of the world that have not been visited by women travellers. There are also few difficulties, physical or emotional, real or imagined, thathave not been met and usually overcome by thesesame women.Jane Robinson's first book,Wayward Women, was a guide to women travellers and their writing, and having read over a thousand of their books she is uniquely qualified to compile this anthology. Life is never dull for her intrepid women, whether diving to the bed of the Timor Sea or reaching thesummit of Annapurna. From an encounter with a snake in the Amazon jungle to shipwreck and kidnap on the Barbary Coast, there are tales of adventure, derring-do, and great danger. There are also moving accounts of unimaginable hardship, includingcaring for a family in an ammunition cart during the siege of Delhi and a journey through Tibet that leaves its author childless and widowed.There is no such thing as a typical woman traveller--and there never has been--as this exhilarating anthology shows on a journey of its own through sixteen centuries of travel writing, aboard almost anything from a Bugatti to a Bath chair. You are taken as far afield as it is possible to go, in thecompany of some of the most extraordinary characters you are ever likely to meet.