Women Travel Writers: Two Episodes complete, and the Road Ahead to Spring 2027

My neighbour, the travel writer Stephen Powell, and I started this series with a simple question, what did it take for a woman to travel, alone, and write about it, in centuries that gave her almost no permission to do either? Two episodes are now complete and the answer is turning out to be different every time. Two women, living nearly 80 years apart, travelling for entirely different reasons, and writing books that still need to be read.

In May 2026, we facilitated a Travel Writing Retreat at our homes in the Algarve. For a few years I have offered writers the opportunity to meet and learn together in a beautiful space in the Eastern Algarve.

Our Travel Writing series is building towards something bigger: a Travel Writing Retreat in May 2027, where we’ll spend time with writers, the process of writing, and reflect on what makes a travel writing book work. More on that below. First, where the series has been, and where it’s going.

Episode One: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Stephen led our first episode on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762), who travelled to Constantinople in 1716 as the wife of the British ambassador and wrote the Turkish Embassy Letters, one of the earliest and best Western accounts of Ottoman life by a woman who was actually let into the rooms men weren’t.

In March 1717, Wortley Montagu watched Ottoman women in Constantinople perform “engrafting”, inoculating children against smallpox using a small amount of live matter from an infected person. She had her own son inoculated there in 1718, the first English person to undergo the procedure, and in 1721, during a London smallpox epidemic, she had her daughter publicly inoculated to demonstrate the practice worked. She pushed it into royal circles and, controversially, saw it trialled on condemned prisoners at Newgate (all survived and were freed). Decades before Jenner’s vaccine, a woman’s travel writing helped bring a life-saving medical practice into England, arguably the single most consequential thing any travel writer in this series did with what she saw and experienced.

Episode Two: Mary Wollstonecraft

I led Episode Two, on Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), who was born into a family of seven children (apologies, I said twelve in the video), best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), but three years after that book made her one of the most talked-about writers in England, she set off alone across wartime Scandinavia on an errand to find lost silver for Gilbert Imlay, the father of her child, during a time when their relationship was already collapsing. The letters she sent him became Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796): part travelogue, part political argument, part memoir of a woman describing the journey both inwardly and outwardly.

Wollstonecraft wasn’t a travel writer by accident. From 1788 she reviewed for Joseph Johnson’s Analytical Review, and by the most reliable count, she reviewed around twenty-four travel books there before writing her own. It is arguable that by 1795 she was one of the best-read critics of the genre in England, which is exactly why the Letters breaks from travel-writing convention as knowingly as it does. Her landscape writing, waterfalls, cliffs, the rock passages at Kvistrum and Strömstad, fed directly into the Romantic nature writing of Coleridge and Wordsworth a generation later.

Coming next: Mary Kingsley, led by Stephen Powell

For Episode Three, Stephen is taking the lead on Mary Kingsley (1862–1900), who travelled through West Africa in the 1890s and wrote Travels in West Africa (1897): Victorian ethnography, natural history, and travel narrative in one restless, funny, sharply observed book.

Kingsley travelled in full Victorian dress, long skirts and all, by deliberate choice, and it saved her life more than once. She fell into a game pit dug by local hunters and lined with sharpened stakes; where she’d have been “spiked to the bone” in the trousers some advised her to wear, her skirts caught and cushioned the fall instead. Her own words: “It is at these times you realise the blessing of a good thick skirt.” It’s a vivid detail that says a lot about how differently Victorian women travel writers had to move through the world, armoured, quite literally, by the same conventions that were meant to hold them back.

The road ahead.

Once Episode Three is live, I will look at Flora Tristan, and after that, here’s where the series goes next (not necessarily in this order).

1. Flora Tristan (1803–1844): French-Peruvian writer and early socialist. Denied an inheritance on grounds of “illegitimacy,” she travelled to Peru to fight for it; when that failed, she turned the refusal itself into Peregrinations of a Pariah (1838), one of the earliest travel books to fuse personal grievance with political argument.

2. Gertrude Bell (1868–1926): archaeologist, writer, and one of the most influential Arabists in British imperial policy, who mapped and wrote about the Middle East from a position of institutional access.

3. Isabelle Eberhardt (1877–1904): Swiss-born, she left Europe in her early twenties to make Algeria her home, travelling the Maghreb desert disguised as a man and writing some of the era’s most unconventional accounts of North African desert life.

4. Rebecca West (1892–1983): self-taught from age sixteen after schooling ended for lack of funds, she went on to write Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, an account of the Balkans undertaken during the genuinely dangerous pre-WWII years.

5. Barbara Greene (1907–1990): in 1935 she made the same Sierra Leone/Liberia journey as her cousin Graham Greene, and wrote her own account, Too Late to Turn Back, as a quiet, self-mocking counterpoint to his more famous Journey Without Maps.

6. Dervla Murphy (1931–2022): left school at fourteen for family caregiving, then cycled solo from Ireland to India starting in 1963, the journey that became Full Tilt and the start of one of the great independent travel-writing careers. On some of her later journeys she was accompanied by her daughter.

7. Erika Fatland (b. 1983): the Norwegian writer behind Sovietistan (2015), her account of travelling through the five post-Soviet Central Asian republics: Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.

A few themes keep resurfacing as this series takes shape: how often a journey begins in necessity rather than choice, and becomes something closer to freedom afterwards. How the conventions these women were bound by, whether a skirt, a disguise, or a chaperone, are accommodated, and how travel writing, across three centuries, keeps turning out to be as much a record of the self as of the place.

Stephen and I are working inside those same themes in our own writing. Stephen’s book, Letters from Mozambique, and my own, Blue Eyes and the Stones, launching 6 October and following the journey of a cat, both grew out of the same instinct that runs through this whole series, that place and emotional engagement add value to the travel writer’s craft.

Travel Writing Retreat: Spring 2027 All of this is building towards our Travel Writing Retreat in Spring 2027. It’s where the series stops being something you watch and starts being something you do: time spent with the writing itself, in conversation, away from a screen. If you’ve been following along with Episode One and Episode Two, this is where it’s all heading. More details to follow as we get closer.

Watch the series

Episode One (Lady Mary Wortley Montagu)

Episode Two (Mary Wollstonecraft)