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At the age of 45, he packed his suitcase and never looked back.
The housewife with a nondescript life, dutiful wife and mother of two children, headed for the Middle East.
She then she headed to Iceland.
With the money she earned from the stories she decided to go around the world... twice.
She did not stop traveling until her death in 1858.
Ida Laura Pfeiffer
is one of the protagonists of
Female Odysseys
(Anaya Touring), by Olga García, which brings together the biographies of eleven exceptional women travelers and their adventures through jungles and deserts, mountains and oceans facing the dangers and difficulties of time that they had to live.
It is not surprising, therefore, to read how Pfeiffer questions the reader in the preface to his book on Iceland: "And you, dear reader,
please excuse my love of adventure
[...], which in the eyes of many does not agree with what is expected of my sex".
It was 1852 and the intrepid Pfeiffer, who had been born in Vienna in 1797, had not yet traveled around the world.
The English orientalist
Sophia Poole
, another of the book's heroines, looked to Egypt.
She was interested in the landscape and also its people.
So it is that in 1842 Poole traveled with her two children to the pyramids of Giza with the aim of portraying the life of the women of that place and that time.
Poole described in great detail the ascent of the pyramids (then permitted) and the solemn arena setting that surrounds them.
All with robe and veil.
And she confesses: "It is not easy for a woman to explore the interior of the pyramids of Giza."
Ida Pfeiffer.SHUTTERSTOCK
Also going against the tide, the aviator
Beryl Markham
crossed
the Atlantic from east to west
in a small plane in 1936. Her flight was seven hours longer than that of Amelia Earhart, who crossed it four years earlier in the opposite direction, but above all, more eventful since that crashed nose-first in Nova Scotia.
When years later, this Briton who grew up in
Kenya
published her memoirs
Of Her West with the Night,
Ernest Hemingway expressed her amazement at how "wonderfully well written" they were.
I feel ashamed of myself as a writer," added the American.
Born into a wealthy Scottish family,
Constance Gordon-Cumming
could have been a tea drinker for life, but we know her as another of the traveling ladies of the Victorian era.
At the age of 30, the writer and painter embarked for the first time to
India
.
It was the year 1868. Many other great trips will follow: to ancient Ceylon, to Fiji, Tahiti, to the USA... always far from that "gray and scarcely appetizing England".
Yosemite National Park
wins
you over by the beauty of it.
"I have wandered far enough in this wide world to be able to recognize a wonderfully unique place," she wrote.
Gordon-Cumming painting.
In addition to knowing the history of these pioneers through their own words, the author of
Feminine Odysseys
proposes us to explore the
same destinations
that they discovered, albeit with the comforts of the 21st century.
In this way, we travel from the California of Gordon-Cumming to the California of today.
The author gives the keys to travel today to Markham's Kenya, Poole's bustling Cairo, Pfeiffer's Iceland, etc.
Completing this selection of women from other times are the stories of
Emilia Serrano de Wilson
, a Spanish journalist, explorer and poet;
that of
Eliza Scidmore
, an American photographer and geographer;
and that of
Alexandra David-Néel
, the "provocative" traveler from Tibet, among others.
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