Lanterna Rally

Author: Pat Barr

Publisher: Charnwood

Published: 1970

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13:

This entertaining and informative biography traces the career of one of the Victorian Era's most extraordinary characters. Raised sedately in an English parsonage and a spinster until middle age, Isabella Bird began her travels at the age of 40, when, on her doctors' advice, she wearily took a steamer to Australia, in search of health and happiness. The experiment was a failure until, in Hawaii (then known as the Sandwich Isles), the decorous parson's daughter suddenly discovered the thrill of life in the wilderness. This became the first of many adventures, as she explored little-known regions of the islands and became one of the first women to climb Mauna Loa. She next journeyed to the Rockies -- at that time truly a wilderness -- and rode for weeks, alone among the high peaks. The books she wrote about her American adventures were an immediate sensation in England, and for the rest of her long life Isabella was one of the world's celebrated explorers. She spent most of the next 30 years in the obscurer parts of Asia, visiting Japan and Korea shortly after they had been opened to Westerners, living among the Tibetans, exploring China and Malaya, Persia and Kurdistan, where few Westerners -- let alone a lady writer -- had ever been. At the age of 70, Isabella went to Morocco, visiting the fierce warrior tribes of the Atlas Mountains and was royally entertained by the Sultan. Isabella Bird wrote prolifically; her books remain classics of the genre. And Pat Barr draws on them extensively, to let Isabella describe many of her adventures in her own words. The result is a biography which combines a genuinely thrililng tale of exploration with the charm and fascination of Isabella Bird herself, a very resourceful and very human lady explorer.