Doughty Travellers

Abstract

In his biography of Richard Burton, Byron Farwell begins by stating that ‘the explorer is always a civilized man; exploration is an advanced intellectual concept’.¹ Therefore, he argues, it is a concept unknown to primitive peoples, and one that remains incomprehensible to women. This observation points to qualities that are intrinsic to exploration — especially the kind of exploration that concerns us here, that which produces travel narrative; first, that it is linked to politics, a more accurate term than Farwell’s ‘civilisation’, and second, that it is patriarchal, even when undertaken by women such as Hester Stanhope or Gertrude Bell who were capable enough of grasping ‘an advanced intellectual concept’.