C Ihe Ladies c cu. V'VVAN - History and Classics, Department of

IntroductionXXXVIIWhen Vyvyan wrote her autobiography, the nrst volume of which, Roots and Stars(196Q), appeared the year after Arctic Adventure, she explained that she grew up in afamily particularly stultifying in its adherence to Victorian propriety. For her,attempts to escape the social constraints of upper-class Victorian femininity tookthe form of reading, nature-walks, and solitary travel. Again and again in herautobiography, she associates the freedom of travel with masculine activities. Shedescribes daily outings with her "capable, Victorian, unlovable governess ...along a road connned by high earth hedges ... a dull, empty, 'there-and-backagain'walk, for those hedges were like 'don'ts', they kept you away from thingsthat you wanted" (9). These outings she contrasts with the adder-hunting expeditionsduring "long holidays when, the governess being absent and our twobrothers home from school, we had excitements in our everyday life" (12). Withher brothers, she would walk "along the hedge-top ... like pioneers surroundedby danger" (13), or on top of the kitchen garden wall "looking down on the houseand garden and farm, and the moor and Gilly wood, with the widened vision ofexplorers" (15).Later, she received permission to take solitary walks by inventing social dutiesthat would take her away from home (37) and by developing an "improving"interest in natural history (33). She was not the only English woman to gainaccess to travel by invoking the Victorian ethics of self-improvement andcommunity service. In a society that identined travel outside the domestic spherewith male activity, women who wished to travel often offered socially usefulexcuses. Famous traveller Isabella Bird Bishop, one of the few women accepted asa member of the RGS in the nineteenth century, justified her Asian travels withthe excuse of missionary work; Kate Marsden succoured lepers in Siberia; andMarianne North produced paintings of tropical flowers, which are now theproperty of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. Botanizing, sketching in watercolours,or recording ladylike "impressions" of the exotic spaces of the worldcould justify an otherwise inappropriate delight in leaving home to wanderabroad. In British society, the "adventure" and "freedom" promised by travelhad decidedly different connotations for women than for men: as KarenLawrence has recognized, "the female traveler's particular baggage includes thehistorical link between female wandering and promiscuity" (16 nI8). One of theprimary appeals of both travelling and reading books of travel lay in the breathtakingadventures of conventionally male heroes "conquering" wilderness that,by definition, lay outside the law, order, and consequent safety of civil society.