Isabella Bird

Isabella Bird was born in 1831 in Yorkshire and spent her childhood in ill health — doctors repeatedly advised travel as a cure. The prescription worked better than they intended. By the time she died in 1904, she had circled the globe several times, ridden through the Rocky Mountains, traversed the Yangtze, toured Korea on horseback, and documented her journeys in vivid, opinionated letters that she turned into books.

Her writing was distinguished by its directness. She described what she saw without sentimentality — the physical discomforts of travel, the political complexities of colonialism, the specific pleasures of landscapes that her contemporaries found threatening. In A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879), she wrote about camping alone in the mountains of Colorado with the same matter-of-fact tone she brought to reports of floods and famine in China.

She was 70 when she took her last major journey, travelling through Morocco on horseback. In 1892 she became the first woman to be elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, an honour the institution's male members contested vigorously.