Undiscovered Scotland

 

It's almost trivial to say that really good travel writing has a power to transport you to another place with a force that is hard to match in almost any other form of literature. But it's not just about conveying a sense of place as an end in itself. Really good travel writing can also serve as a window into the soul of the author who produced it. Yes, a piece of writing about this place or that has to be true to the location and has to have something interesting to say about its setting. But what it's really about is the experience of the author in that place. Without the personal insight, most of the value is lost.

There's a fine tradition of travel writing that extends back for almost as long as people have been setting their thoughts down in permanent form. I say "people", though I could just as accurately say, for most of that time at least, "men", for most travel writing has traditionally been done by men. That is as regrettable, for much the same reason as it's regrettable that women are so under-represented in recorded history more widely. It means that the experiences and thoughts of around half the humans who have ever lived - and, in this male reviewer's opinion, the more perceptive and empathic half at that - are lost to us. Yes, there has been an increasing number of women writing about their travels over the past century, as well as earlier exceptions like Dorothy Wordsworth. To see what's been lost to history simply compare her account of her tour of Scotland in 1803 with Samuel Johnson's or James Boswell's accounts of their tour of the country thirty years earlier. Which tells you more about the real experience of being there?

Against that background, "There She Goes: New travel writing by women", edited by Esa Aldegheri is a fascinating project and the result is memorable and intensely readable. That is not just because the seventeen authors are women, it's because the accounts that are included excel in absolute terms. That the authors are women means that their approaches, experiences and priorities tend to be different from those of a group of male authors and that adds hugely to the interest of this collection. But it's the underlying quality of the writing that makes this a book I'd recommend without reservation.

You can get a sense of the range of content from the publisher's description: "'There She Goes' brings together seventeen women writers – of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry - in an anthology of travel tales to inspire, encourage and empower women adventuring through the world in different ways and stages of life. There she goes celebrates the stories of women getting on with getting from one place to another - the grit, courage and determination of moving through the world with babies, with periods, with grief and loss, with the menopause, with magic and humour, with bodies that are ill or disabled or seen as foreign and Other. These are stories so often shared between women verbally but - despite the drama, excitement and humour they contain - are rarely printed. This is a book offering a new perspective on what it means to be adventurous. In times where fear and worry seem so prevalent, it is a gift of courage and celebration."