Isabella Bird was a woman of remarkable gifts. Her accounts of her experiences became best-selling books and established for Isabella Bird a reputation as one of the great travel writers of her day. This book tells the story of Bird.

Curious Life For A Lady: The Story Of Isabella Bird

Literature & Fiction

Barr, Pat

Classics

Penguin Uk

Looks at the interaction between the Japanese and Westerners after Commodore Perry opened the nation to foreign trade

The Coming of the Barbarians: A Story of Western Settlement in Japan 1853-1870 (Penguin Travel Library)

History

Asia

Penguin??Books

This is a sequel to "The Coming of the Barbarians" and deals with the period from the accession of Emperor Meiji to the end of the Ruso-Japanese war. In the author's own words, it is "a story of Meiji Japan through the eyes of the Westerners who were involved in the process of its rapid modernization." The Japanese reactions to this process are recorded and explained. The author has written "A Curious Life for a Lady", "To China With Love", "The Memsahibs" and "Taming the Jungle".

Deer Cry Pavilion: A Story of Westerners in Japan 1868-1905

Based on interviews, memoirs and tape recordings this is a description of the life of British women living in diverse areas and circumstances in India from 1905 to 1945. Most prominent are women contributing to the country's welfare as teachers, doctors, nurses and missionaries, women living isolated lives in India's wildest hinterlands and women actively involved in the country's social problems and its struggle towards independence.

The Dust in the Balance

Hamish Hamilton

Daughter of English missionaries, Alice Greenwood is captured during a massacre of Christians and taken away to Hunan, where she becomes a concubine in the house of Chu

Jade: A Novel of China

Contemporary

St Martins Pr

The Deer Cry Pavilion

Macmillan

Isabella Bird was a woman of remarkable gifts. In 1872, at the age of forty, this rather earnest daughter of a country parson abandoned the rectory nest and began her pioneering journeys to some of the most inhospitable corners of the world. Undismayed by discomfort or danger she was to spend almost thirty years travelling - to the Rocky Mountains, the Sandwich Isles, to Japan, Malaya, Kashmir and Tibet, to Persia, Korea and China - where an indomitable spirit, an unassuming cordiality and, above all, a limitless capacity for being interested won her universal welcome. Her accounts of her experiences became best-selling books and established for Isabella Bird a reputation as one of the great travel writers of her day. 'Miss Barr has her measure. She and Miss Bird are well suited. The style of both is fresh, energetic, visual, making an enchanting book.' Evening Standard 'Rich and riotous as her intrepid heroine moves at the speed of a silent movie through landscapes lusher than any technicolour.' Times Literary Supplement 'A rare book.' Sunday Telegraph

A Curious Life For A Lady: The Story of Isabella Bird

To China with love;: The lives and times of Protestant missionaries in China, 1860-1900

Religion & Spirituality

Christian Books & Bibles

DOUBLEDAY

To China with love: The lives and times of Protestant missionaries in China 1860-1900

Secker and Warburg

Thousands of British women lived in India during Victorian times. They first went out as wives, mothers, sisters; others followed as teachers, doctors, missionaries. What they did and how they responded to their strange environment were seldom thought worthy of record, and writers have handed down to us a fictional image of the typical 'memsahib' as a frivolous, snobbish and selfish creature flitting from bridge to tennis parties 'in the hills'. For the most part, these cliches bear little resemblance to the truth; many women loyally and stoically accepted their share of the responsibility with endurance, courage and resilience. This story is developed around a number of women who wrote in an entertaining and intelligent fashion about their Indian experiences, starting with the arrival on the scene of one of the wittiest and cleverest of them all - Emily Eden, sister of Lord Auckland who was Governor-General from 1836 to 1842. It ends with Maud Diver, who maintained that the random assertion made by Kipling about the 'lower tone of social morality' in India was unjust and untrue. The dramatis personae of the book include Vicereines, wives of Civil Servants and missionaries struggling to break down the subservience of women throughout the vast sub-continent. Through women's eyes we witness the principal historic events at the time - the Afghan conflicts, the Mutiny - as well as the daily routines in very different cantonments and some of the British personalities who made their mark on nineteenth-century India - Honoria Lawrence, Flora Steel, Lady Sale. In this vivid account, Pat Barr evokes the sights and smells of Victorian India, its teeming masses, its problems so impossible, it seemed, for Englishwomen to solve.

The memsahibs: The women of Victorian India

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Books by Barr, Pat