Dear Reader,
Autumn is in full swing. As I embark on my daily morning walks, I enjoy the leaves falling around me in a colourful cascade. The air is crisp and it’s getting darker. For me, there are new beginnings on the horizon. I am resigning from my job to freelance and focus more on this thing called writing. I feel nervous about this monumental life change. But if not now, when? I told myself to give it one year. If it doesn’t work out, then another job will always be there. And what better way to commemorate a new season and new beginnings than to read about the adventurous life of Isabella Bird, a woman who made it her life’s mission to explore and embark on the unknown?
Isabella Lucy Bird (1831-1904) was one of the most adventurous, fearless British ladies of the Victorian era.1 A celebrated world traveller, Isabella visited locations as remote as the Colorado Rocky Mountains, Hawaii, Japan, Saigon and Singapore.2
After each adventure, she compiled her letters into celebrated accounts of her travels. Her lifelong friend, the preeminent Victorian publisher, Mr John Murray III, published all of her books.
Isabella was born in Yorkshire, England on 15 October 1831. She was born into a loving and tight-knit family. Three years after her birth, another daughter, Henrietta, joined the family. Despite Isabella’s extensive travelling, she and Henrietta remained extremely close throughout their lives.
Isabella and her family lived a nomadic life, as the family relocated often for her father’s job as a curate. As a young girl, she enjoyed reading literature and showed an interest in writing.
Isabella suffered from ill health all of her life. She had insomnia, which, as she aged, never went away. She had a spinal issue and suffered from “nervous headaches” and chronic pain. Her father, in the hopes that travel would cure some of her ailments, gave Isabella money and encouraged her to travel to North America. And this is where her adventures began.
In 1854, aged only 22, Isabella set out on her first solo journey on a Cunard ship. She travelled to Nova Scotia, then to Boston, Cincinnati, and Chicago before making her way to Toronto. Isabella wrote descriptive, entertaining letters to her sister Henrietta. It’s these letters that became the foundation for her first two books, The Englishwoman in America and The Aspects of Religion in the United States of America. Though most readers today are familiar with Isabella’s most famous book, the collection of letters from her Rocky Mountains adventure, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains.
After Isabella’s father became ill and died from complications of the flu in 1858, she joined her mother and sister in Edinburgh. There she settled for a little while; she wrote, took on charity work, and established a shelter for homeless workers. But the call to travel beckoned and soon she began to plan for upcoming trips.
In an era when people travelled for specific reasons, Isabella travelled for travelling’s sake. She wanted to discover what existed beyond the horizons of her life. She wanted to explore new cultures.
In Hawaii, she was the first woman to climb one of the highest volcanoes in the world. Elsewhere, she rode elephants.
Travelling as a woman during the Victorian era could not have been comfortable. Isabella did what she had to do to make her travels bearable. She created a scandal by not wearing a corset during her travels.
Another comfort she adopted was to ride astride. She found riding sidesaddle completely useless. Horrified journalists wrote about how unladylike she was. This infuriated Isabella. As a rebuttal, she wrote to her sister (knowing the letters would become public later) how many layers of petticoats she wore, all to prove her femininity.
But the most remarkable aspect about Isabella is that she travelled alone. In an era when women didn’t travel alone.
John Murray took Isabella on as a client because he noticed women were voracious readers. There was a huge market for travel narratives written by women. The female Victorian reader lived vicariously through these books. Isabella’s descriptive letters brought to life the locations she travelled to. She wrote about the cultures, customs, and hardships of the places she visited. Through her vivid words, female readers travelled alongside Isabella.
Readers were enamoured by descriptions such as this one in A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, ‘The beauty is entrancing. The sinking sun is out of sight behind the western Sierras, and all the pine-hung promontories on this side of the water are rich indigo, just reddened with lake, deepening here and there into Tyrian purple. The peaks above, which still catch the sun, are bright rose-red, and all the mountains on the other side are pink; and pink, too, are the far-off summits on which the snow-drifts rest’.
Isabella was also a photographer. Some of her books included her travel photographs. Her books also included maps and illustrations. This was an enormous hit with a public hungry for armchair adventuring.
Sadly, Isabella’s mother passed away in 1868. The deaths of both of her parents were a blow. They had been a loving, close-knit family and now Isabella and Henrietta were left alone. But instead of settling down to live with Henrietta, Isabella continued to travel. Around this time, a kind-hearted, young Scottish doctor, John Bishop, proposed marriage to Isabella. Isabella did not want to marry. She was in her 40s and enjoyed her independence and freedom far too much to settle down. She used the excuse that she was ill and too devoted to her sister to marry. In truth, Isabella wanted to continue travelling. She was in the middle of organizing a trip to Japan, which she eventually visited in 1878.
In 1872, Isabella visited Australia and New Zealand. And in 1873 she stayed in Hawaii for six months. In 1875, her Hawaii letters became the book, Six Months in The Sandwich Islands.
In 1873, she traversed the unexplored Rocky Mountains in Colorado. Her guide was a man with only one eye, Jim Nugent, or ‘Rocky Mountain Jim’. Jim lost an eye in a fight with a bear.
They travelled together for months. Jim features heavily in her letters to Henrietta. These letters, later compiled in her book, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, offered valuable insight into solo travelling for women of the era. She wrote in vivid detail about mountaineering and her close friendship with Jim. Jim was a rough, American mountain man. But around Isabella, he changed his ways. He became gentler with his actions and softer with his words. It’s clear through the letters that Jim revered Isabella. He respected her. And she felt the same about him. In her letters to Henrietta, Isabella justified Jim’s rough life by stating his youth was full of sorrow which is why it ‘had led him to embark on a lawless and desperate life’.
It wouldn’t be for over 100 years later, after a close study of her Colorado letters, that scholars ascertained how deeply Jim and Isabella cared for each other. But why didn’t they marry? It’s difficult to say. Perhaps Isabella felt that they were too different to build a life together. She was born into a respectable British family. He came from the rough, American Wild West. After she left the Rockies, they continued to correspond with each other. But just a few months after she left North America, she received the heartbreaking news that Jim was shot and killed. We may never have concrete evidence of how Isabella felt about Jim, but in her later years, she claimed that Jim’s vision appeared before her on the day he died.
In 1878 she travelled to Japan, China, and Korea, among other places in Asia.
Sadly, Isabella’s beloved sister Henrietta died in 1880. It was only after her sister’s death, that Isabella decided to settle down. In 1881 she married the kind doctor, John Bishop, who had been patiently waiting for her all these years.
However, tragedy struck once again. In 1886, shortly before their fifth wedding anniversary, John became ill and died. During the mourning period, Isabella decided to continue travelling but this time with a greater purpose. She educated herself on medicine and began travelling as a medical campaigner. She travelled to India at age 59. There, along with medical missionary Fanny Jane Butler,3 she founded several hospitals, one in memory of her late husband. After her time in India ended, she explored Baghdad and Persia.
In 1892 she became the first female member of the Royal Geographical Society.
In 1901 she travelled through Morocco.
She was planning another visit to China when she fell ill and died, aged 72, on 7 October 1904. She is buried in Edinburgh, Scotland, alongside her beloved family.
In 1985, in gratitude for her exploration of the Rocky Mountains, Isabella was inducted into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame.
Her countless travel narratives were valuable for the insight she provided about other cultures at a time when travel was either financially impossible or difficult for most Victorians.
Mr Fodder rattled so amusingly as we drove away that I never realised that my Rocky Mountain life was at an end, not even when I saw ‘Mountain Jim’, with his golden hair yellow in the sunshine, slowly leading the beautiful mare over the snowy plans back to Estes Park, equipped with the saddle on which I had ridden 800 miles! A drive of several hours over the plains brought us to Greeley, and a few hours later, in the far blue distance, the Rocky Mountains, and all that they enclose, went down below the prairie sea.
A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains
Besides contributing to many periodicals, Isabella wrote numerous books. Some of the books, listed below, are a true testament to her extensive travelling.
The Englishwoman in America, 1856
The Aspects of Religion in the United States of America, 1859
Notes on Old Edinburgh, 1869
A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 1874
Six Months in the Sandwich Islands, 1875
Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, 2 volumes, 1880
The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither, 1883
Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan, 2 volumes, 1891
Among the Tibetans, 1894
Views in Western China and Korea, 1896
Korea and her Neighbours, 2 volumes, 1898
The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, 1899
Pictures from China, 1900
If you’d like to read more about women who travel, then the Virago Book of Women Travellers might be of interest. It contains a generous collection of travel writings by a selection of inspiring women travellers.
The top image of Isabella Bird is via The Victorian Web. The second image is a drawing of Isabella Bird via Wikimedia Commons. The third image is the original title page of Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, also from Wikimedia Commons. The fourth image was created with Substack’s AI generator.
There are others, which we will discuss in due course.
This list is not even a small fraction of the places she visited. Isabella accomplished and explored so much. It’s nearly impossible to write about her in one short article.
Fanny Jane Butler (5 October 1850 – 26 October 1889) was a medical missionary.
Good luck!
This is a wonderful post. What an inspiration Isabella was! Lovely to hear that you’re following your dreams. Wishing you lots of luck for your year of writing. It sounds like you have a very exciting year ahead!