Woah baby, am I behind on talking about books. I had the best of intentions, I really did, but, it turns out, driving is not conducive to writing and when I’m camping I usually don’t have my computer with me. Now that I’m going to be still for a while I’m psyched to go back and reexamine some of the books that I picked up and read on my road trip. I thought it was very appropriate to start with A Woman’s Walks by Lady Colin Campbell (née Gertrude Elizabeth Blood…what a name, eh? Also this is important because apparently there’s another more recent Lady Colin Campbell. This is the Lady Campbell who was born in 1857.) I picked A Woman’s Walks up in between hiking in Glacier National Park and Yellowstone. I was hanging out in Missoula and wandered into the bookshop Fact and Fiction and this was the first thing I saw. It has a badass well dressed woman climbing a mountain on the cover…there was no way I was leaving without it.
Lady Colin Campbell was, from what I understand, the travel writer of Victorian Britain. A Woman’s Walks is a collection of her travel essays which read like the Victorian version of a travel blog (trust me I was inspired while reading). This is one of those books in which it’s helpful to imagine the social context in which it was written. Women generally did not have the money or safety net to really travel and explore. Being a woman still isn’t exactly a safe thing, but being a woman traveling alone in the late 1800’s was downright scandalous. From what I understand of Lady Colin Campbell’s personal history scandal was something she was familiar with, but it also helped that she came from a fairly wealthy family and then married an even more wealthy man (who she tried to divorce because he gave her syphilis and the courts wouldn’t let her because sexism. Google her. It’s salacious and fascinating.)
Basically, Lady Colin Campbell traveled in style but what I love about her essays is that she really did get out and explore. Sure, she had wealthy connections and was wealthy herself but when it came down to it she wanted to learn as much as she could and talk to as many people as she could. Her essays are interesting to read not just because she was traveling around learning things, but also because she inserted her personality in them which for the time was pretty eccentric. For this time, well, I think I’d probably go on a trip with her!
Commonplace Book Entries:
“For the collecting of varied experience there is nothing like being a good-natured idiot. A reluctance to say “No” to unreasonable requests, especially from helpless brother or sister idiots, is apt to introduce all sorts of variations into the quietest and best-ordered existence.”
-“Marooned at Milan” by Lady Colin Campbell
“…the innocence of Destruction as to the effects she is likely to produce makes her all the more dangerous.”
-“Ixiona” by Lady Colin Campbell
Advertisements Share this:
