Kirjahaku

Victorian traveller Mary Kingsley has been portrayed as a victim of nineteenth-century attitudes towards women, a brave and daring explorer, an anti-imperialist agitator and even a feminist heroine. In this challenging and controversial new biography, Dea Birkett breaks through the shallow clichs which have defined this extraordinary female figure to frame a new image of the traveller as actively constructing her own history. For the first time, Mary Kingsley is seen as responding to and part of her time.

Lost in the surf of the South Pacific lies a speck of volcanic rock. Home to thirty-eight islanders--descendants of the Bounty mutineers--Pitcairn has no cars, no crime, no doctor, and no regular contact with the outside world. For two centuries, "Fletcher Christian's children," whose culture and language are a bizarre blend of Polynesian and eighteenth-century English, have lived out a unique social experiment.Acclaimed British travel writer and journalist Dea Birkett, obsessed like many with the island's image as a secluded Eden and its connection to the mysterious and intriguing Bounty legend, traveled across the Pacific on a cargo ship and became one of the very few outsiders permitted to land on Pitcairn. Although the islanders initially seemed welcoming, they soon wove her into a web of decades-old disputes and thwarted desires. With no means of escape, Birkett's adventure to the other side of nowhere at last became a kind of prison.

What spurred so many Victorian women to leave behind the security and comfort of their middle-class homes to undertake perilous journeys of thousands of miles? This book draws on the diaries, letters and other writings of more than 50 such women to describe their experiences and aspirations.