Around the World with Isabella Bird

Curators

• Adelina Crudu

• Rania Sivaraj

Isabella Bird

Isabella Lucy Bishop (née Bird) (1831-1904) was possibly the most significant female traveller of her time. Born to middle-class evangelical Christians in Yorkshire, Bird had suffered from numerous ailments since her childhood and travelled for most of her adult life to abet her symptoms, citing the open air as a cure. From the early 1850s until her death in 1904, Bird visited North America, Australasia and parts of the Middle East, South and East Asia, writing and publishing multiple books that recounted her travels. This exhibition offers an insight into three of her experiences – namely in Hawaii, Persia and Kurdistan and Korea – and their respective publications. We hope to emphasise the sheer expanse of land that she covered via visual aids and the importance of letter writing and documentation to her travels.

Letter to Henrietta Bird, 13 February 1879 [Library reference: MS.42022]. From the National Library of Scotland

Isabella Bird's letters to her sister Henrietta could sometimes be extraordinarily long. This letter, written from the Malay Peninsula in Southeast Asia, runs to a remarkable 116 pages.

The display

Further reading

Bird, Isabella, The Hawaiian Archipelago: Six Months among the Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, and Volcanoes of the Sandwich Islands (London: Murray, 1876)

Bird, Isabella, Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan: including a summer in the Upper Karun region and a visit to the Nestorian Rayahs: with portrait, maps and illustrations (London: Murray, 1891)

Bird, Isabella, Korea and her neighbours: a narrative of travel, with an account of the recent vicissitudes and present position of the country (New York: F.H. Revell Co.,1897)

Dorothy, Middleton, “Bishop [née Bird], Isabella Lucy (1831-1904), traveller”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)