In the Footsteps of: The Challenge of Recreating and Reflecting on the Writings and Achievements of Historic Women Travellers.

This thesis analyses and explains the approach I took reflecting on the journeys and experience of four female travellers of the eighteenth end nineteenth centuries: Isabela Godin, Mary Kingsley, Kate Marsden and Isabella Bird. Recreating their journeys enabled reflection on their achievements and experiences at a time when their aspirations were disdained, they struggled to find sympathetic publishers, and had to use various literary devices to gain an audience. My second journeys showed how the world and the societies they encountered has changed in the intervening years, and prompted me to develop a methodology for linking the two journeys – theirs and mine – in the same piece of travel writing through the use of dual narrative.

I acknowledged the achievements of my subjects, constantly mindful of the value of their books and the hardships and dangers of the journeys they made. My own journeys in their footsteps were heuristic means of understanding their experiences and struggles. I used a ‘time-travel illusion’ in one text to enable me to imagine a dialogue with Kate Marsden, a complex and persecuted woman, in an attempt to understand her motives and, for the first time, bring out the full impact of her challenging journey. These techniques were employed to break the fourth wall and use my body and experiences as a narrative devices.

This commentary has drawn on my auto-ethnographical reflections linking my intellectual journey with my physical ones to show how this interweaving creates layers of texture and meaning. This has done more than simply highlight the achievements of these brave pioneers of female exploration. In employing this perspective I have engaged the senses to enhance my ‘In the Footsteps’ approach. Site-specific locations were not enough, I felt the mountain wind, I tasted the bitter tea and I travelled dangerous rivers. I made sacrifices for my art – just as they did.