Off the Beaten Track: Three Centuries of Women Travellers.

Off the Beaten Track: Three Centuries of Women Travellers By Dea Birkett Foreword by Jan Morris National Portrait Gallery Publications, $40

Having had the "peculiar experience" of traveling both as a man and as a woman, writes esteemed British travel writer Jan Morris in the forward to this richly illustrated companion to an exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery in London, "I have reached the conclusion that [at least since 1950] the female traveler has had it easier than the male." Host men in the preceding three centuries, however, would not have chosen to switch sexes, as Morris did on a 1972 trip to Casablanca. Indeed, the life of the premodern female traveler was fraught with prejudice and beset with barriers. Yet travel they did, from Gertrude Bell in 1900s Iraq to Pocahontas in 1616 London. Emily Lowe, who traveled to Norway with her mother in 1857, wrote, "Ladies alone get on in traveling much belier than with gentlemen.... The only use of a gentleman in traveling is to look after the luggage, and we take care to have no luggage," Organized into seven major themes (adventurers, companions, writers and artists, and so on) and punctuated by short biographies (the tale of Lady Isabel Burton's infamous trek to Mecca in 1869, disguised as a boy, is among the best), Off the Beaten Track is ideal for armchair time traveling. Though no same sex trysts are noted, Morris does offer that among these women "there were doubtless some lesbians."