“What Could Be More Ridiculous Than a Girl in the Jungle?”

Abstract

Jane’s trip to Peru and her adventures in pursuit of the tribe of primitive men in the Gran Pajonal constitute the bulk of her first book, The Jungle Is a Woman.¹ This book set the tone for her long career in travel writing, establishing her as a middle-class working girl with typical American values who, quite by surprise, discovered in herself a great love for travel and adventure—and a knack for writing about it. In The Jungle Is a Woman, Jane breezes through her early years and meeting with Ken Krippene all in the first chapter, and then speeds forward to Peru as one would dive into water, bracing her reader for the sensation. The persona she created for herself is simple and effective: She is a sincere and enthusiastic charmer with whom other women can identify and men can admire. Her writing speaks to her readers’ hidden desire to escape the daily grind and hit the road for excitement and fulfillment. Today’s readers who visit her works should realize that she wrote all of her books like novels, heavy on narrative and often just as heavy on dramatization that stretches actual fact. Sometimes she stretched to the point of fabrication—but in all of her works is a root of truth based on her perception of what she experienced.