Travel Writing Additional Reading
“To the Royal Geographic Society", Punch, June 10, 1893
A lady an explorer? A traveler in skirts? The notion’s just a trifle too seraphic. Let them stay at home and mind the babies, Or hem our ragged shirts; But they mustn’t, can’t and shan’t be geographic! — Anonymous verse in Punch
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Contemporary poem on travellers - “Postcard from a Travel Snob” by Sophie Hannah
I do not wish that anyone were here. This place is not a holiday resort with karaoke nights and pints of beer for drunken tourist types – perish the thought.
This is a peaceful place, untouched by man – not like your seaside-town-consumer-hell. I’m sleeping in a local farmer’s van – it’s great. There’s not a guest house or hotel
within a hundred miles. Nobody speaks English (apart from me, and rest assured, I’m not your sun-and-sangria-two-weeks- small-minded-package-philistine-abroad).
When you’re as multi-cultural as me, your friends become wine connoisseurs, not drunks. I’m not a British tourist in the sea; I am an anthropologist in trunks.
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Foot Notes: Reflections on Travel Writing, Dervla Murphy The Wilson Quarterly (1976-), Vol. 16, No. 3 (Summer, 1992), pp. 122-129
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Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890) The Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El Medinah and Mecca, 1885
Burton was a phenomenal linguist, who over the course of his life mastered more than forty languages and dialects. He worked for the British Army in India, where he learned to disguise himself with ease. In April 1853 he set sail from England, with the aim of making the hajj to Mecca and Medina, disguised as a Sufi dervish. Fewer than half a dozen Europeans were known to have visited these holy sites and lived, and of those only the Swiss explorer J. L. Burckhardt had left a detailed account. Burton stayed in Medina in July and August 1853, and in September he arrived in Mecca. Here is an extract from his travelogue on the experience. Was Burton’s decision to perform the hajj in disguise justifiable? Why do you think his book was so popular? How
would you describe Burton’s attitude towards Mecca?
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Gertrude Bell (1868-1926)
Safar Nameh: Persian Pictures, 1894 Gertrude Bell is one of my favourite travel-writers. She was incredibly intelligent, and went to university at a time when not many women did, gaining a first in modern history at Oxford University. She was a talented mountaineer, and excellent at languages. This extract is from her trip to Persia - now known as Iran - in 1892. At the beginning of the twentieth century she travelled widely in the Middle East, and worked for the British Arab Bureau during WWI. After the war she was central to the founding of the modern state of Iraq, and good friends with King Faisal. Bell published this book anonymously - why do you think she might have done that? Can you tell this is a woman writer? Do you want to travel to Iran after reading this
passage?
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Vita Sackville-West
Passenger to Teheran, 1926 Vita Sackville-West was born into a hugely wealthy family, but because she was a girl she would never inherit the family home, Knole. This caused her sorrow throughout her life. She married the diplomat Harold Nicolson and they had two sons - but both Harold and Vita were in fact homosexual and had many affairs. Nonetheless they had a very happy marriage! Vita wrote lots of novels and poetry, and two travelogues which described her visits to see Harold in Persia in the 1920s. Virginia Woolf, a close friend of Vita’s and famous novelist herself, considered this book very highly indeed. When she visited Baghdad, Vita stayed with Gertrude Bell (see previous page). What similarities exist between the women’s subject choice and writing style?
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Robert Byron
The Road to Oxiana, 1937 Like many travel-writers, Robert Byron was extremely intelligent and interested in lots of things, including architecture, art, history, religion and literature. He wrote several travelogues, and The Road to Oxiana is his last and greatest. Many critics consider this one of the finest travelogues of the twentieth century, not least because of its wide range of styles - it is clearly influenced by the Modernist movement in literature. Byron died at sea during WWII. How does Byron make his work amusing? Which of his attitudes do we now consider unacceptable? In what ways does this affect your reading of the text? How successfully does Byron combine humour with information about what he sees?
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Rebecca West
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, 1941 Rebecca West was the pseudonym for Cicily Isabel Fairfield, a journalist and novelist who was a notable feminist and socialist at the beginning of the twentieth century. Like the other travel-writers already mentioned in this pack, she had a complicated personal life! This work dates from her trips to Yugoslavia in the 1930s with her husband. Her novel The Return of the Soldier (1918) is an important modernist text on WWI. This travelogue, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, considers the state of Yugoslavia and the history of the region, in the light of the looming Second World War and the rise of fascism in Europe. How does West create a sense of the scenery? Is it possible to tell this is a woman writer?
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Wilfred Thesiger (1910-2003)
Thesiger travelled widely in the Middle East and Africa, and worked for the British Army during WWII.
How does Thesiger suggest he is travelling in a time of great change for the Bedouin? How do you think he feels about it?
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Martha Gellhorn
Travels with Myself and Another, 1978 Martha Gellhorn was an American journalist and travel-writer, whose work on families during the Great Depression in America is one of the most moving texts I have ever read (The Trouble I've Seen, 1936). She was particularly well known for her war reportage, and she witnessed the Spanish Civil War, WWII in Europe, the Vietnam War, the Six-Day War in the Middle East, and civil wars in Central America. Only in the 1990s - when she was in her eighties! - did she decide she was too old to report on wars in the Balkans, where Rebecca West had travelled in the 1930s. What are the differences in travel between what Gellhorn has observed, and the experiences of Burton, Bell and Sackville-West? How do you think Gellhorn feels about this? How do you think these differences might be conveyed in travel-writing today? Is travel-writing from the twentieth-century more or less interesting to you than travel-writing from previous centuries?
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