I’ve wanted to start a series on travel books for a really long time and this is the one I needed to start it on.
A few years ago Mick Conefrey wrote The Adventurer’s Handbook. I haven’t read it but I assume it’s along similar lines – small tastes of stories about travellers, adventurers and explorers. Somehow it managed to escape his notice that there wasn’t a single woman in that book, so this one came into being “to redress the balance”.
You’re not really going to get any mountaineering advice from this book, attire notwithstanding. The majority of the women who appear were doing their adventures a couple of centuries ago, when vast swathes of the world were mysterious and unknown, when it was acceptable to hire or occasionally coerce fifty locals to carry your luggage or occasionally to carry you in a bath chair, when people routinely carried an entire arsenal with them, and yes, when women were doing this kind of adventuring in all sorts of skirts, long before the days of passports and visas and Mr Cook’s organised excursions to Switzerland. Of course, there are more recent stories – Jerri Nielsen in 1998 and Ellen MacArthur in 2005 but they’re an exception.
This book is a collection of short anecdotes, ranging between one paragraph and three pages in length. These are not full biographies – I saw another review describe them as “Google fodder”: see a name and a taste of story and go research for yourself. It groups the stories loosely under the themes of “why”, “how”, “compared to a man” and “danger” but never really answers its own questions.
I suppose there is no correct answer to questions like “why do women adventure?” and “how do women adventure differently to men?”. Conefrey is visibly careful not to generalise. However, he does compare them a lot. Some women appear only in tandem with their husbands, some feel like an offshoot of their husband and there’s an entire chapter comparing women adventurers to either their male expedition partner or the man who did the most similar expedition or adventure, usually before the woman did it. I did find myself wondering if we needed quite so many men in a book that’s supposed to be exclusively about women.
Some names appear again and again. Freya Stark, Gertrude Bell, Mary Kingsley – there are clearly bigger stories to tell about them. They went off to places women just didn’t go to in those days and did things women just didn’t do. Many of them sound like unpleasant people I probably wouldn’t like to know in real life but they make things like my dark winter trip to the High Arctic or my boss-scaring visit to Vilnius look very tame indeed.
I like this book. It was a birthday present from a friend so I’m fond of it on that account. It’s full of snippets of wild, interesting or just weird stories. It’s the kind of book I suspect you should dip into rather than read straight through.
And if you want to buy it, I’m going to leave an Amazon affiliate link right here:
How to Climb Mont Blanc in a Skirt by Mick Conefrey