Abstract
Isabella Bird is deservedly the most acclaimed female English-language travel writer of the nineteenth century, and possibly the most productive of all time in terms of words written and miles travelled. Her first book, The Englishwoman in America (1856) involves comparatively secure means of transportation (though Bird is at one point robbed on a train). From The Hawaiian Archipelago (1875) and A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879) onwards, she selected more arduous modes — horse, boat, even yak — for a succession of increasingly exotic locations: Australia, Persia, Kurdistan, Tibet, Sinai, Korea, Malaysia and China as well as Japan. Paradoxically, given that she was a lifelong invalid through the after-effects of an operation for her spinal curvature, she remained almost continually in motion across the globe.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
See for example Jane Robinson, Wayward Women: A Guide to Women Travellers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
The resulting volume, Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan, 2 vols (London: Munay, 1891)
Evelyn Kaye, Amazing Traveller: Isabella Bird (Boulder, CO: Blue Panda, 1999), 180
Isabella Bird, The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither (London: Munay, 1883; reissued Singapore: Monsoon, 2010), 230.
A threnody perhaps most eloquently articulated in Alex Kerr’s Lost Japan Footscray: Lonely Planet, 1996
Fraser observes that ‘the truth is that very large and important classes of the population are as violently opposed to the inroads of the foreigner as they ever were, and a cautious government finds it not easy to keep the retrograde party within bounds’. Mary Crawford Fraser, A Diplomat’s Wife in Japan: Sketches at the Turn of the Century, ed. Hugh Cortazzi ([1899] New York: Weatherhill, 1982), 33.
See L. M. Cullen, A History of Japan: Internal and External Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 135–74.
Eva-Marie Kroller, ‘First Impressions: Rhetorical Strategies in Travel-Writing by Victorian Women’, Ariel 21 (1990): 87–99
On Bird’s ‘vindictive fury’ when it is suggested that she had donned ‘masculine habilments’, see Ban, 184. On the Japanese adoption of Western dress, see Jason G. Karlin, Gender and Nation in Meiji japan: Modernity, Loss and the Doing of History (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014), 19–71.
Three Letters to Kaneko Kentaro, 26 August 1892, in David Duncan, The Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (London: Methuen, 1908), 321–3.
A suggestive parallel could be drawn with Robyn Davidson’s camel trek across the Australia desert in Tracks (New York: Vintage, 1980).
Stopes comments ‘the Japanese have 20,000 troops active in Korea, and cannot keep order my only surprise is that any Koreans submit without decent open warfare; they were not conquered, but tricked out into having their Government absolutely controlled by the Japanese Government’. Marie Carmichael Stopes, A Journal from Japan, a Daily Record of Life as Seen by a Scientist (London: Blackie, 1910), 84.
Recently expounded by Mary Beard, ‘The Public Voice of Women’, LRB 36.6 (20 March 2014), 11–14.
On continuing friction with Asia, see John W. Dover, ‘An Aptitude for being Unloved’, in Ways of Remembering, Ways of Forgetting: Japan in the Modern World (New York: New Press, 2014), 105–35
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Steve Clark
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Clark, S. (2015). ‘A Study rather than a Rapture’: Isabella Bird on Japan. In: Kuehn, J., Smethurst, P. (eds) New Directions in Travel Writing Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137457257_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137457257_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-56767-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-45725-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)