Celebrating the achievements of Isabella Bird, this is a lavish pictorial record of her last great journey through China, in the closing years of the 19th century.

Letters to her sister about the author's travel in Colorado, autumn and early winter 1873.

This dashing picture book biography takes us around the world with a daring Victorian female explorer and author. Exploring was easier said than done for a young woman in nineteenth-century England. But somehow Isabella persisted, and with each journey, she breathed in new ways to see and describe everything around her. Question by question, word by word, Isabella bloomed. First, out in the English countryside. Then, off to America and Canada. And eventually, around the world, to Africa, Asia, Australia, and more. Always more—more places, more questions, more words—and all those experiences became books, in which she described the land she traveled, the people she met, and the dangers she experienced. And finally, Isabella returned home to England, where she became the first female member of the Royal Geographic Society and was presented to the Queen. But to wild-vine Isabella, the world was home. Back matter features an author's note, bibliography, and timeline.

The legendary Victorian traveler's previously unpublished letters to her homebound sister.

The English traveler explores New England and the Mid-west, commenting on social mores and politics.

Isabella Bird traveled to the wildest places on earth, but at home in Britain she lay in bed, hardly able to write: 'an invalid at home and a Samson abroad'. In Japan she rode on a 'yezo savage' through foaming floods along unbeaten tracks, and was followed in the city by a crowd of a thousand, whose clogs clattered 'like a hailstorm' as they vied for a glimpse of the foreigner. She documented America before and after the Civil War and was deported from Korea with only the tweed suit she stood up in during a Japanese invasion. In China she was attacked with rocks and sticks and called a foreign dog, but she never gave up and went home. 'The prospect of the unknown has its charms.' Transformed by distant lands, she crossed raging floods, rode elephants, cows and yak, clung to her horse's neck as it clambered down cliff paths, slept on simple mats on the bare ground, unable to change out of wet clothes or get out of the searing heat. Her travels and the books she wrote about them show courage and tenacity, fueled by a restless spirit and a love of nature. She is as unique now as she was then.