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

1. Isabel Savory's biography Lady Isabel Savory, born in 1869 in Weybridge, Surrey 1 , was the second of at least five recorded children. Her father was a goldsmith and her family was financially quite comfortable. As a child, she was allowed to hunt and play golf. She seems to have been well educated in literature and the arts 2 . Isabel went on a journey in India between 1898 and 1899, as sister to a commissioner's wife 3 . She made a hunting expedition with friends from Bombay up to Peshawar (Pakistan), to the Khyber pass – a mountain pass connecting Afghanistan and Pakistan, an integral part of the ancient Silk Road 4 – into Kashmir and then to the Nilgiri hills 5 . In 1900 Lady Savory published a book about her experience: A sportswoman in India: Personal adventures and experiences of travel in known and unknown India, which became a best seller and gave her fame as a travel writer, which she further strengthened with her next travels in Morocco and France; in 1902 she published Our march across southern Morocco, an account of a trip undertaken with her friend Rose Bainbridge-Chamberlain without permit or escort, through southern Morocco to Marrakech, while a year later she published what would have become her most famous book: In the tail of the peacock: Travel and adventures of an English woman in Morocco, where she describes the places she visited and what she learnt about local culture, people, souks and traditions. The title of the book comes from the moorish proverb “The Earth is a peacock: Morocco is the tail of it” 6 . Her last book published, in 1919, was The romantic Roussillon: In the French Pyrenees, an account of a jaunt into the French mountains. 1 Kenneth P. Czech, With Rifle and Petticoat: Women as Big Game Hunters, 1880 – 1940, New York, Derrydale Press, 2002, pp. 27-31. 2 The London Times archive, London 3 Extract from 'Book of the week', The Nation, New York, December 6, 1900 4 Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khyber_pass> 5 Shakari Connection <http://www.shakariconnection.com/women-hunter-books.html> 6 Trotamundas Press <http://nuke.trotamundaspress.com/Thewomentravellers/tabid/53/Default.aspx> 4