Isabella Bird

Isabella Bird: The Invalid Who Rode Astride

At nineteen she had a fibrous tumour cut out of her spine. The doctors, having failed to cure the headaches and the insomnia, prescribed fresh air and finally a sea voyage. That prescription produced the most travelled Englishwoman of the nineteenth century — a clergyman's daughter who rode eight hundred miles through the Rocky Mountains astride rather than sidesaddle, climbed Mauna Loa, went up the Yangtze, and at seventy crossed the Atlas Mountains of Morocco on a black stallion so tall she needed a ladder to mount it.

An Invalid Childhood

Isabella Lucy Bird was born on 15 October 1831 at Boroughbridge Hall in Yorkshire, daughter of Dora Lawson and the Reverend Edward Bird, an Anglican clergyman whose postings moved the family from Maidenhead to Tattenhall in Cheshire, then Birmingham, then Huntingdonshire. Her father was a keen botanist and taught her plants; her mother taught her everything else. She read voraciously.

She was also ill more or less continuously — spinal trouble, chronic headaches, insomnia, and the depression that came with them. The 1850 operation gave only temporary relief. What worked, as it turned out, was motion. Bird was a semi-invalid at home and an indefatigable traveller abroad, and the contrast was so stark that it has occupied her biographers ever since.

America, Hawaii, and the Rockies

In 1854 her father gave her £100 and permission to stay away as long as it lasted. She went to the United States with relatives, and the letters she sent home became *The Englishwoman in America* (1856), published by John Murray, who would remain her publisher and friend for life. The book shows her, in one assessment, "losing her prejudices as she met her various hosts."

The great travels began in 1872. She tried Australia and disliked it, then went to Hawaii, where she climbed Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa; two books came out of it, *Six Months in the Sandwich Islands* (1874) and *The Hawaiian Archipelago* (1875).

Then Colorado, in 1873, ostensibly for the climate. She rode over eight hundred miles through the Rockies, astride, in defiance of everything a Victorian lady was supposed to do with a horse. The letters to her sister Henrietta ran first in *The Leisure Hour* and became *A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains* (1877), still her most famous book. It contains the strangest figure in her writing: the one-eyed outlaw and trapper Jim Nugent — Rocky Mountain Jim — whom she described as "a man any woman might love but no sane woman would marry." She left. He was shot dead less than a year later.

Japan, and the Marriage

From 1878 she turned to Asia — Japan, China, Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaya. *Unbeaten Tracks in Japan* (1879) recorded a journey into the interior, among the Ainu and far from the treaty ports, that few Europeans of either sex had attempted. In 1881 King Kalākaua gave her the Royal Order of Kapiolani.

Meanwhile an Edinburgh surgeon, John Bishop, had been proposing to her for years. When Henrietta died of typhoid in 1880, Bird accepted him; they married in February 1881. He died in 1886, leaving her wealthy and, by her own severe judgement, dissatisfied: she decided her earlier travels had been "hopelessly dilettante" and resolved to train in medicine and travel with a purpose.

The Second Career

She left for India in February 1889, nearly sixty. In Kashmir, working with the Englishwoman Fanny Jane Butler, she founded the John Bishop Memorial Hospital — sixty beds and a women's dispensary, paid for by her husband's will on land given by the Maharajah.

Between 1889 and 1891 she travelled Ladakh, Persia, Kurdistan and Turkey, went through Baluchistan to look for the source of the Karun, gave evidence to a House of Commons committee on the persecution of Christians in Kurdistan, and made representations to the Ottoman Grand Vizier. *Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan* (1891) and *Among the Tibetans* (1894) came out of these years. Her last great journey, in 1897, took her up the Yangtze and the Han and into Korea, producing *Korea and Her Neighbours* (1898) and *The Yangtze Valley and Beyond* (1899); Morocco followed.

She had also taken up a camera, making her own photographic record of the countries she passed through, and was elected to the Royal Photographic Society on 12 January 1897.

The Fellowship

In 1890 she became the first woman given honorary fellowship of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. Two years later she was admitted a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in London — one of the first batch of women elected — and the institution promptly tore itself apart over it. The controversy was not about her qualifications, which were beyond dispute, but about whether the society could survive the admission of women at all. It closed the door again shortly afterwards, and did not reopen it until 1913.

Why Isabella Is Called a Genius

Bird's claim rests on the quality of the eye and the sentence, not on discovery. She was not a scientist and mapped no blank spaces; her route through Japan or Persia was rarely virgin ground. What she had was an unusual capacity for accurate, unsentimental observation of places that her readers understood only through cliche, and the prose to deliver it — candid, specific, funny, and largely free of the missionary condescension that ruins most Victorian travel writing. She wrote nine substantial books and a great deal of periodical work over half a century, and the best of them are still read for pleasure, which almost nothing else in the genre from that decade is.

The deeper quality is stranger and harder to name: an ability to convert physical suffering into motion. Chronically ill and frequently bedridden in Britain, she became functional the moment she left it, and used that fact for fifty years to go where she was not supposed to go and then report it. The Victorian Web's assessment is fair — she "used her pen to alert her many readers to injustices" and demonstrated "the potential for women... to be just as resourceful, resilient and influential as men."

The counter-case is that this is a genius of nerve and prose rather than of intellect, and that her travels rested on the machinery of empire and on a great deal of other people's labour — Chinese porters carried her twelve hundred miles across China. Scholars still argue over how far her books were complicit with the imperial project they describe. Both things are true: she saw more honestly than most of her countrymen, and she saw from a chair other people carried.

Legacy

She died at 16 Melville Street, Edinburgh, on 7 October 1904, and is buried in Dean Cemetery. She was planning another journey to China at the time. Her books remain in print, her photographs survive as a documentary record of Asia at the end of the nineteenth century, and the fellowship she was granted in 1892 — and that the Royal Geographical Society then spent two decades trying to take back from other women — is now simply the way the society works.

Achievements

• Notable work: Korea and Her Neighbours