Amidst all the armchair exploration type reading I do, I have found a subset of titles that have to do with women who take amazing chances and attain impressive results, as explorers, scientists and writers. I've seen some disparaging comments written about them, as if the fact that some women in long skirts went into deepest darkest Africa during the Victorian era is more comical than impressive, but I've always thought they were awesome for merely attempting to do the things they did, let alone accomplishing so much. I posted recently about a book on Florence Baker, former harem girl who traveled in Africa with her husband and Dorothea Bate, a self-taught paleontologist who spent decades working for the London Museum and made all sorts of scientific contributions. Both of those women were lucky to find biographers who took their lives and crafted gripping reads out of them and I highly recommend To the Heart of the Nile (which is massively on sale at Powells) and Discovering Dorothea.

I discovered Lesley Blanch through The Wilder Shores of Love, a collection of four mini biographies on Isabel Burton, Jane Digby, Aimee Dubucq de Rivery and Isabelle Eberhardt. The women are fascinating subjects on their own and their lives read more as the stuff as novels than nonfiction (but it's all true) but it is Blanch that puts this one over the top. She is clearly very interested in her subjects and that enthusiasm is infectious; you want to know more about these women because Blanch found them so damn interesting.

Blanch passed away earlier this year (at the age of 103) and was referred to as a "scholarly romantic". Here she is on Wilder Shores of Love (originally published in 1954):

"There are two sorts of romantic: those who love, and those who love the adventure of loving". Her book pioneered a new kind of group biography which focused on women escaping the boredom of convention. "When I wrote The Wilder Shores of Love, over fifty years ago now, my title coined a phrase which I still hear people use, or sometimes see in the press — 'the wilder shores of Westminster' in a piece on stormy politics, or 'the wilder shores of romanticism' on a new fashion."

I am now a proud member of the "cult of Lesley Blanch" and plan to read several other books by her next year - including her autobiography.

Barbara Hodgson has written several illustrated novels I love including The Lives of Shadows (reviewed by me for Bookslut) and The Sensualist, a mystery like no other. But her two collections on women travelers are so well done - so beautiful to the eye from start to finsih - that I consider them particularly precious. In No Place For a Lady, she literally covers the world, from Asia to South America, Russia, Europe and all points in between. Her pages are filled with photographs and drawings, maps and quotes that illustrate just what it was like for the women she writes about to travel the world. There are dozens of travelers profiled here, dozens of books quoted from and discussed that readers will feel compelled to keep a pen and paper handy so they can keep track of the many adventurous lives they want to research further.

Dreaming of East is a similar title although it is more tightly focused, this time on "Western Women and the Exotic Allure of the Orient". Dozens of women travelers are discussed again, although this time the framework includes "Scholarly Travel", "The Logistics of Travel" and "Western Women/Eastern Men". It is clear from reading this book that Hodgson is endlessly intrigued by the lives of the women she writes about and just can't stop researching them; which is a great boon to curious readers.

For anyone interested in adventurous titles (tales of both male and female explorers), I strongly suggest visiting the Eland Publishing site. Martha Gellhorn's travel titles can be found there, as well as Sybille Bedford's memories of Mexico and, of course, Lesley Blanch's autobiography. Lots of titles that you have likely never heard of and will richly enjoy.

[Post pic of Lesley Blanch]