As one accustomed to traveling with some frequency, sitting at home these past two months has certainly instilled in me a certain desire to go forth into the world once again – even an otherwise unexciting business trip would do at this point. So when I looked over my shelf of books awaiting a reading (“shelf”… singular? Oh who am I kidding?) John van Wyhe’s new Wanderlust, The Amazing Ida Pfeiffer, the First Female Tourist quickly caught my attention.
While I am very familiar with Dr. van Wyhe as a result of his extensive writings about Darwin and Wallace, I must admit that I don’t know Ida Pfeiffer from Adam – or perhaps more appropriately, Eve. Nevertheless, the story of this early ninetieth century explorer seems quite interesting indeed.
Separated from her husband and with her children grown, she set off to travel the world – alone. Far from making the famous Grand Tour of Europe in style and comfort, a tradition among young women of means that was nearing its end at the time of Ms. Pfeiffer’s first trip, she rather set out on her own – with little baggage and no where near sufficient money to travel in comfort or style – for Istanbul, then Jerusalem, then Iceland, and eventually around the entire globe, twice.
The journals she wrote and published about her trips became best-sellers, and it is through these, as well as his characteristically meticulous research that Dr. van Wyhe re-discovers her story – one that has long been slowly disappearing from popular view with the passage of years – and presents it for a fresh set of new readers in a new age as a reminder of a remarkable and adventurous woman who set her own course through life despite what others may have thought or said, and became renowned as a travel writer and ethnographer as a result.
Nota bene: as I have received some stinging criticism in the past for bringing attention to publications from the National University of Singapore Press due to their books being sometimes difficult to obtain in North America and Europe, I would like to offer the useful piece of information that while this book is indeed not apparently available through either Powell’s or even Amazon, Blackwell’s does list it and will happily ship wherever a copy is needed.
