Across Patagonia is a travel narrative written by Lady Florence Dixie, Scottish writer and feminist. She left her aristocratic life and her children behind in England, and set out to travel, accompanied by her two brothers, her husband, and a family friend who served as a guide. Dixie debated going elsewhere, but chose Patagonia because few Europeans had ever set foot there. Dixie paints a picture of the landscape using techniques reminiscent of the Romantic tradition of William Wordsworth and others, using emotion and physical sensation to connect to the natural world. While she describes the land as "uninviting and feared territory," Dixie's actions demonstrate that survival in a wild land requires both strength and agency. During her travels in Patagonia, Dixie is "active, hardy, and resilient", rejecting Victorian gender constructs that depicted women as weak and in need of protection.

Patagonia is the ultimate landscape of the mind. Like Siberia and the Sahara, it has become a metaphor for nothingness and extremity. Its frontiers have stretched beyond the political boundaries of Argentina and Chile to encompass an evocative idea of place. A vast triangle at the southern tip of the New World, this region of barren steppes, soaring peaks and fierce winds was populated by small tribes of hunter-gatherers and roaming nomads when Ferdinand Magellan made landfall in 1520. A fateful moment for the natives, this was the start of an era of adventure and exploration. Soon Sir Francis Drake and John Byron, and sailors from Europe and America, would be exploring Patagonia's bays and inlets, mapping fjords and channels, whaling, sifting the streams for gold in the endless search for Eldorado. As the land was opened up in the nineteenth century, a crazed Frenchman declared himself King. A group of Welsh families sailed from Liverpool to Northern Patagonia to found a New Jerusalem in the desert. Further down the same river, Butch and Sundance took time out from bank robbing to run a small ranch near the Patagonian Andes. All these, and later travel writers, have left sketches and records, memoirs and diaries evoking Patagonia's grip on the imagination. From the empty plains to the crashing seas, from the giant dinosaur fossils to glacial sculptures, the landscape has inspired generations of travellers and artists.

In a tale remarkable for its quiet confidence and acute natural observation, the author of Paddling Hawaii begins with her decision, at age 60, to undertake a solo, summer-long voyage along the southeast coast of Alaska in an inflatable kayak. Paddling North is a compilation of Sutherland’s first two (of over 20) such annual trips and her day-by-day travels through the Inside Passage from Ketchikan to Skagway. With illustrations and the author’s recipes.

Weary of her life in English society, during 1878-1879 Dixie travelled with her husband, two of her brothers and Julius Beerbohm in Patagonia in South America. There, she hunted big game and ate it with gusto. On one occasion, while riding on the prairie, her party was overtaken by a huge prairie fire, and her horse bolted with her. On her return to England, Dixie wrote her book Across Patagonia, which discussed Dixie's observations of the country and its inhabitants. Lady Dixie also shared her observations of Patagonia with Charles Darwin. Lady Dixie sent Darwin a copy of Across Patagonia; Darwin's copy of this book is part of the Library of Charles Darwin located in the Rare Books Room of Cambridge University Library. A hotel at Puerto Natales in the Chilean part of Patagonia is named the Hotel Lady Florence Dixie in her honour.