Off the Beaten Track: Three Centuries of Women Travellers

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Imagine a traveller, and you imagine a pioneering white man, probably of the early Victorian era, cutting his way from the Cape to Cairo with an entourage of a few hundred Africans in tow. But women have been at it for centuries. From playwright and novelist Aphra Behn’s journey to Surinam in the 1660s to Freya Stark’s 20th century desert journeys, they have placed their own marks on the map of exploration.

I was asked to write this book to coincide with an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of the same title. My article in the Museums Journal describes the fraught process of collaboration between curator and author.

Left: Maria, Lady Callcott, Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1819
National Portrait Gallery, London