Lady Travelers

Hello, friends, from the newsletter formerly known as Beautiful Things and now called The Diary of Lady Traveler. Long time no see…

Did you miss me? Did you even notice I was gone? I hope you’re all having a lovely green spring filled with flowers and sunshine.

I’m excited to get back in the swing of things, and to start writing again…but first, I want to tell you about something that happened while I was on my break.

I’ve been thinking for the past few months about the direction I wanted this newsletter to take…or overthinking, to be more accurate. And honestly, it was tiring. I mean, I don’t have to tell you how exhausting thinking can be.

In the two years that I’ve been writing here, Substack has gotten to be a very crowded place. The travel section in particular seems to have taken a turn. It's gotten, for lack of a better word, more influencer-y. Which is fine, but it’s not me. I started to wonder if Substack was really where I wanted to be writing.

Anyway, these things were weighing on my mind when, in the first days of my break, I picked up a book: Unsuitable for Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellers by Jane Robinson.

Unsuitable for Ladies collects the writings of mostly 18th, 19th & 20th-century women travel writers. Some of the writers were familiar to me, but so many more were not. And the book turned out to be an inspiration to me in a few ways.

First of all, I remembered that women have been writing about their travels for as long as people have traveled. At first in letters and diaries, and then eventually in articles and essays, memoirs, and books. I found that I related more to the women featured in the book than I do to the influencers that seem to dominate travel media these days. My goal has always been to write about the places I visit so that people who haven’t visited can go there in their minds.

And so I decided that as Substack gets more influencer-y, I want to move in the opposite direction. I’m going analog, as they say. Which is not to say that I’ll be changing all that much, honestly…it’s more about telling myself that it’s ok to write 3,000-word essays on the places that I’ve visited. Short attention span theater be damned.

Substack is simply a tool, we can make it whatever we want to be.

I had been itching to change my title, though. As I glanced through the book, before I started even reading it, a pattern had emerged in some of the anthologized writings.

First, there were the anonymous books:

A Lady’s Tour Round Monte Rosa

Letters from a Lady

An English Girl’s First Impressions of Burmah.

An Englishwoman in India by A Lady Resident

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Some of the authors were Ladies with a capital L, like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, or Lady Richmond Brown.

And some had names:

A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird.

Journal of a Lady’s Travels Around the World, by Mrs. F.D. Bridges.

A Lady’s Walks in the South of France by Mary Eyre.

A Lady’s Life Among the Mormons, Fanny Stenhorse.

But you can see what they all had in common. They were all self-proclaimed Lady Travelers.

(Some of the titles could even fall under the banner of self-help, like Lilias Campbell Davidson’s Hints to Lady Travellers published in 1889, in which she dispenses invaluable advice like: “As fellow passengers, perhaps, young babies are about as trying as any. Try to avoid them when possible…” and “Never travel without a small flask of brandy, strong smelling salts and an eau de toilette.”)

And so Diary of A Lady Traveler it is. It makes me smile.

Just to be clear, this isn’t a newsletter about solo female travel, or a girl’s guide to the world. I certainly hope my gentlemen subscribers will stick around, because I appreciate them every bit as much as the ladies (Hi, Guys!).

But there isn’t a doubt that, throughout history, women have written from a slightly different perspective than their male counterparts. (I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a men’s blog called Beautiful Things, for one thing.) But it may not be as simple as we first imagine. Jane Robinson, in the introduction to Unsuitable for a Lady, writing about the difference between men’s travel writing and women’s, says, “Part of the difference must lie in the nature of the journey itself. Women have rarely been commissioned to travel, and so their accounts tend not to be prescribed by the need to satisfy a patron or professional reputation (except the professional reputation every writer who travels — as opposed to traveller who writes — is obliged to uphold). Women can afford to be more discursive, more impressionable, more ordinary.” To further clarify the point, Robinson goes on to write, “Which brings us back to the essential difference between the two (men and women)…that men’s travel accounts are to do with What and Where, and women’s with How and Why.”

This is all to say that I won’t be changing the way I write or what I write about. This will be the Diary of a Lady Traveler, from the point of view of a modern-day lady who is interested in the how and why of the world.

Unsuitable for Ladies inspired me in one final way. The women I read about are so very interesting. I’d like to introduce you to some of them - both some of the writers whom I encountered in this book, and also some of the fascinating women whose lives have long been an inspiration. So, in addition to my regular essays about my travels, I’ll be writing once a month about the rich history of lady travel writers, starting later this month with the above-pictured Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her eighteenth-century Turkish Embassy Letters. Maybe you’ll even be inspired to read along with me?

Before I leave, a few pieces of housekeeping. I’m turning paid subscriptions back on (thank you so much to my paid subscribers!) - although all content will be free for now. In the next few weeks, I’ll be introducing another feature that I’ve been working on, and at that time, I’ll start paywalling the archive. So read all those old posts while you can! You can see them at my homepage Diary of a Lady Traveler, where you can also find a new directory of some of my most popular posts.

Thank you, as always, for being a reader.

Until next time,

XO