Emily Eden (1797-1869)

Eden and her sister Fanny accompanied their brother Lord Auckland to Calcutta in 1835, on his appointment as governor-general. Up the Country describes their six-month journey from Calcutta up the Ganges by steamer to Benares, and onwards to Kashmir – on foot, and by carriage, sedan chair, palanquin, horse and elephant.

A classic of the literature of the Raj, this book has been reprinted many times. Eden was also an accomplished artist; Portraits of the People and Princes of India was published on her return to England in 1844.

Emily Eden. Up the Country: Letters Written to her Sister from the Upper Provinces of India. (London: R. Bentley, 1866).

Title-page from Emily Eden’s Portraits of the People and Princes of India (London: 1844).

from Portraits of the People and Princes of India.

Lady Anna Brassey. The Last Voyage to India and Australia, in the “Sunbeam.” London: Longmans, Green & Co.1889.

Lady Brassey was the wife of a British M. P. and diplomat, the mother of five children, and a great collector of natural specimens. The family spent most of their life at sea in their 540-ton, three-masted yacht, the Sunbeam. Brassey wrote five very popular travel books about their travels to the Arctic, the Caribbean, South America and Polynesia. In 1887, returning from a trip to India and Australia (pictured here), she died of malaria at age forty-eight, and was buried at sea.

“Lola Montez, the Spanish Dancer” (in reality, Irish-born Maria Dolores Gilbert) was a traveler–adventurer who toured Europe, Australia and California as an actress/exotic dancer and high-end mistress. One of her lovers, King Ludwig of Bavaria, actually made her a Countess. In the 1850s, she took her act to San Francisco and Australia, eventually returning to America as a “lecturer” on such topics as “female beauty” and “love.”

Vol. 1 of North’s three-volume autobiography. The cover decoration for this volume shows Nepenthes northiana, a species of pitcher plants discovered by Marianne North, and named for her.

Marianne North. Recollections of a Happy Life. London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1892.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was a mania for “botanizing” and collecting, in response to the urgings of Linnaeus to catalog the natural world. Many women travelers were excellent naturalists. Mary Kingsley collected plants, rocks, fish and reptiles, discovering new species and bringing back specimens in pickling jars for the British Museum. Margaret Fountaine, a serious entymologist, amassed a collection of 22,000 butterflies, now in the Castle Museum, Norwich. Marianne North collected wood and plant specimens and had five new species of plants named after her.