Maiden Voyages

About Maiden Voyages

This is a collection of women’s travel writings, including work by Joan Didion, Edith Wharton, Mildred Cable, Willa Cather, Isak Dinesen, and others. In wry, lyrical, and sometimes wistful voices, they write of disguising themselves as men for safety, of longing for family left behind or falling in love with people met along the way, and of places as diverse as icy Himalayan passes and dusty American pioneer towns, the darkly wooded Siberian landscape and the lavender-covered hills of Provence. Yet even as their voices, experiences, and paths vary, they share with one another–and with us as readers–reflections upon their gender as it is illuminated by unfamiliar surroundings. Edited and with an Introduction by Mary Morris, in collaboration with Larry O’Connor.

Contributors and writings include: Mary Wollstonecraft, “Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark”; Flora Tristan, “Peregrinations of a Pariah”; Frances Trollope, from “Domestic Manners of the Americans”; Eliza Farnham, from “Life in Prairie Land’; Isabella Bird, from “A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains”; Margaret Fountaine, from “Love Among the Butterflies”; Gertrude Bell, from “The Desert and the Sown”; Edith Wharton, from “In Morocco”; Willa Cather, from “Willa Cather in Europe’; Isak Dinesen, from “Out of Africa”; Kate O’Brien, from “Farewell Spain”; Rebecca West, from “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon”; Ella Maillart, from “The Cruel Way”; Emily Hahn, from “Times and Places”; M.F.K. Fisher, from “Long Ago in France”; Joan Didion, from “The White Album”; Christina Dodwell, from “Travels with Fortune: An African Adventure”; Annie Dillard, from “Teaching a Stone to Talk’; Gwendolyn MacEwen, from “Noman’s Land”.