From the jacket of the book Letters to Henrietta, another potential miracle cure:
“Until the middle-aged, unmarried Isabella Bird (1831-1904) left her native Scotland for an independent life of travel, she was debilitated by illness, suffering from “neuralgia, pain in my bones, pricking like pins and needles in my limbs, excruciating nervousness, exhaustion, inflamed eyes, sore throat, swelling of the glands behind each ear, stupidity.” Bird was so weak that she required a steel support to hold her head up and spent most of her time confined to bed. Desperate to find a cure, her doctors finally packed her off to the Pacific and Switzerland. Once abroad, the forty-year-old invalid miraculously recovered, and became determined to seek any adventure that allowed her to see the singular beauty of nature. In Hawaii, she was the first woman to climb the world’s highest volcano; in Perak, she rode elephants through the jungles; in Colorado, she scaled 14,000-foot mountains, spent six months traveling mostly alone on horseback, and fell in love with a one-eyed
desperado named Rocky Mountain Jim. But whenever she went home to Scotland, her symptoms returned, making another trip essential. Bird’s remarkable journeys took her to the remotest parts of the world and brought her considerable fame. In this fascinating collection of Bird’s previously unpublished letters to her homebound younger sister Henrietta, one experiences her journeys firsthand and gains insight into the ambiguous private life of a woman who often invented her public face.
Containing correspondence from her first two grand tours to Australia, Hawaii, and Colorado in 1872-1873, and to Japan, China, Malaya, and the Holy Land in 1878-1879, Letters to Henrietta provides a fresh view of the legendary Victorian traveler.”