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

XXXVIIITHE LADIES, THE GWICH'IN, AND THE RATMeanwhile, women embodied civilization, or so it was thought; they representedthe antithesis of wilderness, and thus the conventional plot of arduous physicaladventure and death-defying struggles with "wilderness" and "savages" offeredlimited narrative potential for women's travel.So, while Vyvyan was struggling for parental permission to take walks alone inCornwall, her brothers were already abroad, in the military and at work on thefamily cattle station in Australia. Her family accorded her a role restricted to herage, class, and gender: "1 was only one of many thousand victims in our day whenit was considered almost criminal for a girl to follow any career except marriage"(109). Mter fInishing school, Vyvyan endured the "aimless years" (80) of sociallife by taking walking tours, and before the First World War also travelled withfamily members to South Mrica, Queensland, Switzerland, Ireland, Venice, andOrkney. Even so, she describes those travels as "purposeful journeys ... withplanned duration of time and confines of locality, but they brought no widervision nor deeper understanding of the things that matter most" (80).Epiphanies of spiritual transcendence, which Vyvyan associates with solitude innature throughout her autobiography and her travel books, rarely appear in thecompany of her family. Eventually, she persuaded her family to allow her to takeup social work and graduated with distinction from the London School ofEconomics in 1913 with a degree in social science (Kinsman 646-47). At the ageof twenty-eight, she was working in the London slums with the CharityOrganizations Society. She describes the subsequent years as a struggle betweenher family's demands that she fulfil the conventional role of the "homedaughter"(Roots 106) and the independence that her social work as "a paidworker" gave her. That work justified her existence and fulfilled a deep personalneed (III). But it did not fulfil her social and familial obligations, nor did herlater war work in a canteen in France, an internment camp in Holland, andvarious Red Cross hospitals in England.Mter the war, Vyvyan, now thirty-five, found her activities remained circumscribedby family demands. She was sent to Queensland to look after her brother,Michael, who was suffering from depression. On the family cattle station, shefound herself suddenly "in another world ... travelling forward into the veryheart of an unknown continent" (136). Rejecting the "lonely Martha life" (142)of women on remote stations, she nonetheless found that the wide spacesprovided moments of timeless union with nature. The Australian countryside