Barbara Hodgson: Dreaming of East

In 1719, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (a name you have to write in full) described her trip through Turkey in such fulsome terms that women's wardrobes across Europe began overflowing with Oriental garb. There's a hilarious engraving of her in this book, conspicuously over-dressed at a Turkish bath.

She was one among thousands of Western women ravished in varying degrees of literalness by the Eastern Ottoman Empire — Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Turkey, Iraq — over the next two centuries until that empire's disintegration in 1920.

Barbara Hodgson is puzzled that these women sought freedom in regions where their sex was spectacularly restricted. How fatuous. They sought freedom from their own societies, via change, adventure, the exotic. And warmer weather.

Hodgson is a book designer, and although Dreaming of East isn't substantial, it's certainly sumptuous: silky paper, elaborate fonts, sepia engravings, watercolours, 100-year-old photos from lantern slides.

The images often outdo the text. A number show exotic creatures in bizarre costumes. They're the European women, in crinolines, boaters, bustles, holding parasols or lorgnettes, taking tea in the most uncomfortable places.

Others include a Cunard Line poster showing Madam on a camel (both looking supercilious) and apparently in the company of Ali Baba. There's Dinner in the Harem, with everyone bored to death. There's a dragoman with more curves than his scimitar, and a Veiled Beauty not easily distinguished from her armchair.

The pretty slim text is arranged thematically, with sections on accommodation, transport, harems (Richard Burton referred to them in Latin, which only educated and therefore responsible readers could understand), clothing (particular emphasis on problems posed by the rudimentary nature of women's underwear till the 1850s).

Don't expect depth of coverage, although Hodgson presents a good argument for these earlier women travellers as proto-feminists, along with a disapproving French cartoon of such females wielding clubs and trampling on the law.

We hear about a lot of them. Gertrude Bell, who trekked from Jerusalem to Damascus in 1905, then lived nine years in Baghdad; Rosita Forbes, who shot the rifle out of a guide's hand during a frank and free exchange of opinions; Isabel Burton, who stuck a knife and revolver in her belt, piled her hair under a fez, and took on everyone.

They were intrepid, intransigent, impetuous, incomparable. They make you wonder how Britannia ever stopped ruling the waves.

* Hardie Grant Books, $49.95