Ten or 15 years ago, it seemed as if women travel writers might have become an extinct species. Manuscripts submitted by women were subjected to a special set of rules. Editors expected their accounts to include record-breaking feats, promotional gimmicks or at least the use of some eccentric mode of transport before their work could be seriously considered for publication. Titles like "On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers" or "To Lake Tanganyika in a Bath Chair," both written by redoubtable Victorians, are authentic early examples of the genre.
Several well-known contemporary writers have taken this route. Some of the results, such as Dervla Murphy's bicycle trip to India, recounted in "Full Tilt," Christina Dodwell's odyssey in Eastern Turkey and Iran, "A Traveller On Horseback," and Lucy Irvine's year on a desert island, described in minute detail in "Castaway," have been original and engaging. Others are little more than advertising stunts. Books have been written on subjects that include hand-gliding across Jordan, walking from Tibet to Shanghai and taming tigers in Bengal.
The writers who fill the pages of "Amazonian," a recent anthology of contemporary women's travel writing published by Penguin, generally eschew the intrepid-traveler label. Nonetheless, most of them stoically refuse to be fazed by the dangers and depressions that haunt the road. There are plenty of opportunities for them to test this resolve. Ginny Dougary subjects herself to the icy rigors of Canada's high Arctic; Lesley Downer is frog-marched into a police station in rural Ghana on trumped-up charges of spying; Lucretia Stewart arrives in Phnom Pehn the day after a bomb has killed 19 people; Mary Russell negotiates postwar Bosnia by public bus; Shena Mackay's contribution, "Tinsel and Kalashnikovs," describes a meeting with a nationalist Pakistani armed to the teeth.