Travel and Female Emancipation: Isabel Savory's A Sportswoman in India, 1900

I chose to write my thesis about Isabel Savory's book A Sportswoman in India not only because I liked her journey and the style she adopts, but also because I feel something in common with her: the love for nature, the 'hunger for the road', and the curiosity for other cultures with their customs and traditions.

Lady Savory in her book affirms:
“There is no feeling like it! To be in your oldest of old clothes, to feel you are going out of the reach of letters, telegrams, and the faces of the civilised world; free to go and to do exactly as the spirit of the moment moves you; only yourself to answer to: time is of no object; you may wait or hurry, eat where you like, sleep where you like. It is the only life – the only life worth living for we mortals who have been born with the necessity of change rooted in our beings” and this is similar to what I feel when I am on holidays, especially during summer holidays when people spend most of the day in the open air, relaxing from the stress brought by work or study and the daily routine.

When people are on holidays they don't have a fixed schedule as during the rest of the year: they take life easier, they enjoy more the company of each other and appreciate more nature's gifts because, as Savory remarks, “Nature is the true quickener of emotion, the awakener of thought, the background and abode of man, the analyser of the human mind, and the vehicle or subject of human intercourse”.

Indeed, as Isabel affirms, living in the open air is as healthy for the body as it is for the mind, allowing us to develop perceptive powers, to discover our limits and to try to overcome them, as she did in climbing the Himalayas. Nature offers us a sense of freedom “To be out in the air! - to be under the sky! - how much it all implies!”, and infinite beauty “It was worth anything merely to be alive in such a country”.

But the benefits of nature are not the only advantages of travel, which also brings psychological and social improvements:
“To see more is to feel more; to feel more is to think more. Travel teaches us to see over our boundary fences, to think less intolerantly, less contemptuously of each other. It teaches us to overlook the limitations of religion and morality, and to recognise that they are relative terms, fluctuating quantities, husks round the kernel of truth. Travel dismisses the notion that we are each of us the biggest dog in the kennel”.

Travelling leads in this way to tolerance, comprehension, respect, and to a better understanding of the other, but also of ourselves:
“In return for our trouble we learn experience, which no courses of reading, however well they may stock our minds with knowledge, can supply. I have felt stands for more than I can imagine what others have felt. Experience means a variety of things: it includes the development of perceptive powers, dependence upon oneself, and a wider knowledge of self; it inculcates generous views; it causes, in short, a great mental expansion”.

We grow mentally, behaviorally and socially by travelling, because the journey opens our eyes and our minds about an Earth which is so great and so different, and exactly for these reasons – so beautiful. Discovering other places and other cultures reframes our world and the point of view we have about it and makes us understand that our concept of life is influenced by the education we received and the society where we grew. And just because we are used to a certain way of living and thinking, this does not necessarily mean that it is the best, since it is the only one we know.
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