Barbara Hodgson: No Place For A Lady: Tales Of Adventurous Women Travellers

Reviewed by JIM EAGLES


Nervous at the prospect of visiting turbulent places such as Iran or Egypt, Papua New Guinea or Indonesia, Nigeria or Congo?

Read these tales of the doughty women travellers of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries and marvel at their courage.

They travelled to such lands before there was any semblance of law and order and long before international hotel chains and the ubiquitous McDonald's made it easy to find somewhere safe to sleep or eat.

They didn't only have to worry about the murderous precursors of Osama bin Laden but also bandits, slave traders and cannibals.

Mostly women of privileged backgrounds, they treated these dangers with the same disdain with which they shrugged off bedbugs, disease and rotten food.

Sadly, there is only a passing reference to New Zealand, in the story of painter Marianne North, who travelled extensively in search of rare plants in the 1870s.

But that is more than compensated for by the stories of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who visited Turkey in 1717 and wrote an account of life in a harem which stunned civilised society, or Lady Hester Stanhope, the self-proclaimed "Queen of the Desert", who in 1813 rode unveiled and alone through Syria, or Lady Anne Fanshawe, who in 1650 disguised herself as a cabin boy the better to fight off pirates on the coast of Spain.

Unfortunately the writing of this book fails to match the excitement of the stories although that is partially offset by the wonderful choice of pictures.

It's a curiosity, a book to dip into during quiet moments of your voyage down the Nile, rather than a page turner for those sleepless hours on a plane.

Greystone Books, $39.95