1986. 357 pages plus a fold-out map. Unusual among Victorian women travellers, Amelia Edwards (1831-92) was a writer first, a traveller second. By the 1860s she had published novels, poetry, stories and history, and it was not until her journey to the little-explored mountains of the South-Eastern Tyrol in 1872 that travel began to dominate her life and work.
Her 'ramble' with a woman companion in the Dolomites - impassable except by foot or mule and so relatively uncharted as to make the provision of food and shelter a triumph of ingenuity and good humour - was to prove a vital test of the resources demonstrated a year later on her famous trip up the Nile. She was an appreciative traveller, as observant of people and customs as she was thrilled by scenic grandeur, and she relished too the novelty, even the incongruity, of her unorthodox undertaking. Out of print since 1873, this is a wonderfully lively evocation of the spirit of the nineteenth century's most celebrated women travellers.
It would be well if travellers remembered they are not dealing here with innkeepers of the ordinary continental stamp; but with persons who are for the most part quite independent of the albergo as a source of profit, and ready to receive strangers with a friendliness that does not appear as an item in the bill. -From 'Chapter IX: To Agordo and Primiero'
The real-life inspiration for modern-day mystery writer Elizabeth Peters's 'Amelia Peabody' novels, celebrated Victorian adventuress Amelia Edwards enjoyed unexpected notoriety, for a woman, as a journalist, political activist, and world traveler. In 1872, she and a female companion set off on a 'ramble' through the nearly impassable Italian Dolomites, where food and shelter were chancy propositions but the scenery was gorgeous and the people friendly and welcoming. Edwards approached the expedition with humor and enthusiasm, and she regales us with the tale of the journey with the generous, vivacious spirit that made her one of the her era's most daring women. British writer and Egyptologist AMELIA EDWARDS (1831-1892) was a published writer by age seven. Among her books most beloved by readers past and present are the novels Barbara's History (1864) and Lord Brackenbury (1880), and the travelogue A Thousand Miles Up the Nile (1877).
