12 Must Read Travel Memoirs by Women
Go to any travel section at your local bookstore and you’ll find that male authors still dominate the Travel Memoir and Travelogue genres. Male voices share their trekking adventures conquering mountains, expeditions into the depths of rainforests to meet elusive tribes and walking pilgrimages across the landscape. But where are the women’s voices sharing their personal stories of great life-changing adventures?
I enjoy discovering these voices almost hidden and overshadowed by their male comrades taking up much of the shelf space. Here are 12 Must Read Travel Memoirs by solo women travellers. Their books will transport you to the rolling hills and lemon groves of Italy, the harsh landscapes of the Hebrides, The dangers of Afghanistan and the vibrancy of Morocco and more. Come sit a while on a hammock or armchair with a cuppa and be inspired by these authors, they may just ignite your wanderlust for the coming warmer months!
Marram: Memories of Sea & Spider Silk by Leonie Charlton
This intimate memoir blends travel and nature writing beautifully with personal accounts of grief and acceptance. The premise of Charlton’s narrative is a simple one: Observing the vast and rugged landscape as she treks through the Outer Hebrides, Scotland with her friend on ponyback as a pilgrimage processing the death of her mother. The scope of grief and fraught memories parallel the shifting weather and wild terrain. The lyrical ramblings trot and gallop across the page, taking the read with her through the valleys, peat bogs and grasslands. Peppered with poetic description of flora and fauna as well as neolithic cairns, stones and medieval ruins of Celtic history this is a slow and steady travelogue underpinned with down-to-earth honesty as Charlton navigates the beauteous and lush Hebridean panorama.
The Puma Years by Laura Coleman
The Puma Years is an honest and moving memoir that immerses us in the realms of jungle life with Coleman volunteering at an animal rescue centre in Bolivia.
We flow through daily camp life with her as she cares for a Puma named ‘Wayra’ and an assortment of other rescued creatures. Camp life is brutal and Coleman describes the basic and often, harsh living conditions with blunt sincerity and humour as she and her merry band of misfits tackle uncomfortable straw bedding, the compost toilet infested with spiders, the swamp, the balmy heat and lack of water to shower, mosquitos, monsoons and forest fires as well as bigger, more pressing issues such as environmental devastation, vulnerable ecosystems, fighting to survive corrupt logging corporations and deforestation.
In the brutality, there is beauty with a fierce thread of hope, courage and determination to keep fighting for a viable, sustainable future for the Amazon rainforest.
The Land Where Lemons Grow: The Story of Italy and its Citrus Fruit by Helena Attlee
Mouth-watering and evocative prose, this is a woman’s journey exploring aromas, fragrances and tastes from the most beautiful places in Italy and Sicily. This book is a love song about the Italian countryside and its history associated with citrus fruits. Unrushed and textured with lush descriptions of orchards, groves and vineyards in the languid Mediterranean heat, perfectly blending food, travel, history and science, this book oozes fascinating knowledge.
Sour oranges, citrons, esrogim, tangelos, tangerines, mandarins, satsumas, grapefruit, lemons and more drip from the page, the prose so delicious you yearn for a glass of grapefruit juice or lemon gelato as you’re seduced by this summary read. From the Sicilian terraces full of mandarins and blood oranges to the Southern Italian groves full of huge citrons and bergamots, Attlee takes you on a leisurely adventure as she sips limoncello on sun-soaked balconies, discovers new pasta, and savours zesty ice creams meandering through piazzas and rural landscapes.
Tender Maps: Travels in Search of the Emotions of Place by Alice Maddicott
Part travel memoir, part metaphysical study, part "strange histories" - it fits together like a puzzle box: circular, thoughtful, and beautifully strange. Transporting readers to seventeenth-century salons of Paris, the crumbling balconies of modern Georgia, the heat of Sicily, to the mountains of Japan and more, Maddicott’s lyrical psycho-geographical memoir scopes the vastness of our innate emotional and even creative responses to places we travel to.
Some travellers are driven by a goal, a quest, for research or even FOMO, Maddicott suggests that some travel in search of a particular atmosphere and emotive response to local music, literature, food and art. With each chapter dedicated to a new location, the writing is full of references to odd tomes, esoteric philosophies, and tidbits off the beaten path. But more than that, it's a meditation - not just in the sense that it examines the idea of the atmosphere in a non-linear, literal and figurative peripatetic-kinda way -- but because it's dreamy and has an atmosphere of its own.
A Year in The World by Frances Mayes
Frances Mayes is renowned for her successful memoir ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’ adapted into a movie of the same name. But did you know she wrote a travel memoir dedicated to a collection of locations around the world? With her beloved Tuscany as a home base, Mayes travels to Spain and Portugal, France, the British Isles, and the Mediterranean world of Turkey, Greece, the south of Italy, and North Africa.
What we are reading is her personal travel diary as she holidays across the globe– often choosing destinations based on writers who lived and worked where she visits. This is a series of vacations taken by serious lovers of art, food, wine, and gardening plus visiting ancient ruins, museums, and reading other books and poetry. Mayes is known for her strong attention to detail, which is ever present in this memoir. For instance, the various types of foods eaten by the locals and the preparation, as well as types of flowers, trees, gardens, and general scenery, in each vacation spot. Overall this is a charming read for armchair travellers.
Unsuitable for Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellers curated by Jane Robinson
This is a collection of travel writing written by pioneering, intrepid ladies of the 19th and 20th centuries. Arranged geographically, many of the accounts are excerpts from letters and diaries expressing the variety of escapades–whether diving into the bed of the Timor Sea or reaching the summit of Annapurna.
From an encounter with a snake in the Amazon jungle to a shipwreck and kidnap on the Barbary Coast, there are tales of adventure, derring-do, and great danger. There are also moving accounts of unimaginable hardship, including caring for a family in an ammunition cart during the siege of Delhi and a journey through Tibet that leaves its author childless and widowed. In the present day, we imagine women of the past having less freedom, autonomy and being grounded in elite society yet this collection of women's travel writing dispels that notion by showing how there are few corners of the world that have not been visited by women travellers.
The Sewing Circles of Herat by Christina Lamb
Journalist Christina Lamb, at the tender age of 21, leaves the comfort of her hometown in suburban England for Peshawar - a town perched on the frontier of the Afghan war. Throughout this memoir, Lamb chronicles the human stories behind the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Among the people she meets are the brave women writers of Herat who carried on the literary tradition of this ancient Persian city under the guise of sewing circles. Lamb continuously risks her life to attain news regarding warlords, the Russians and the rise of the Taliban. Through a mix of persistence, courage, connections, and writing talent she managed to document the final two years of the struggle for Afghan freedom against the Soviets.
Over the years she kept her finger on the pulse of the region and documented the lives of ordinary people fighting to survive and trying to find little joy in life, regardless of the horrors. Lamb goes back into the past and gives a whole lot of background information on Afghan history, politics, monarchy, trade, and agriculture interwoven with women's issues prominently featured within the narrative, and she discusses the history of different areas of Afghanistan concerning women, education, and the arts, both before and after the Taliban.
Adventures in Morocco by Alice Morrison
In this glorious book, Alice Morrison brings Morocco to vivid life: its people, the magnificent scenery of the country, the way of life, the intricacies of a Muslim/Berber country with an African heritage, Spanish and French influences, Arabic language and culture, rich in every way.
From the blue houses of Chefchaouen to the red sandstone and mud homes of the mountain Berber tribes; the colourful Souqs or the exotic nights at Jamaal el-Fna, in Marrakech and finding peace in a tranquil oasis. Alice describes what she sees with an enthusiasm that makes any reader's mouth water and wish to be whisked away on an adventure to this colourful country.
But more than that, Alice enters right into the spirit, the heart, and soul of the country, travelling by foot through the Atlas mountains, or by car into the magical city of Fez with its ancient university, making good friends at every juncture. With deft twists of detail, Alice offers spirited anecdotes of her journeys, enthralling stories of the people she meets, evocative descriptions of the land around her, and enticing slices of history to embellish the whole, in a way that is entirely captivating, and fed by her knowledge of Arabic and the culture/history of Morocco, a background in intellectual scholarship, worn lightly.
Mermaid Singing by Charmian Clift
Australian journalist Charmian Clift moves away from London with her husband and two children to a sleepy Greek island in the 1950s so she may write a book. Languid and lush, Clift paints an evocative picture of the characters and sun-drenched rhythms of traditional life on Kalymnos, long before backpackers and mass tourism descended.
As they adjust, they discover that Island life is very different from what they left behind. There is no running water or electricity, large families live in single rooms, and the men go off sponge diving for many months of the year to try and eke out a living. In the daily lives described, there is great poverty and tragedy, but also joy, ritual, and an appreciation of nature. Clift describes everything there is, from the drunken evenings in tavernas to the religious festivals and folk superstitions, and the hardships of the women's lives.
Clift’s writing is beautiful, and she draws on more than her observations, peppering her writing with history and myth, both focused on the immediacy of life on the island and seeing its place in the wider world. There is a sensuous immersion as vivid as the light and landscape of Kalymnos.
Granite Island: Portrait of Corsica by Dorothy Carrington
Corsica is an obscure place, a French Mediterranean island not often written about. Brimming on the shelves of the travel section in bookshops are tomes about cycling around Spain, uprooting and living in Greece, hiking trips along the English coast, wine tasting in Italy or backpacking across India. This book is the only book I found dedicated to this almost forgotten island whose neighbours are Sardinia and Italy, you would think, being next door to these popular destinations, Corsica would have more exposure to the tourist and travel market, but it’s rather a mystery.
Carrington lifts the veil and gives us a glimpse into Corsican life, history and folklore. She first visited the island in 1948, in a quest to see some mysterious Neolithic statues that she had learned about near the coastal town of Propriano. She ended up spending the entire summer of that year touring the island. Along the way, she met and stayed with Corsican families, learning about their lives, beliefs and culture. Her writing paints a mesmerising picture of the vast and unbridled natural beauty of the island and its people never before written.
In the Shadow of the Mountain by Silvia Vasquez-Lavado
What if everything you've been looking for in a "memoir of courage" is right here in this book? Silvia Vasques-Lavado is known as "the first Peruvian woman to scale Mount Everest" and this story emotionally packs a punch. It is heart-wrenching, intense, mighty, sad and dark and also light and beautiful. Full of shadows, Silvia is courageous enough not only to walk through but to become.
Silvia does not conquer her fears, or conquer Everest; she ascends and becomes at peace in these shadows, in these narrow paths, in the pain of climbing and the pain of living. As though on a pilgrimage she grapples with climbing Everest whilst internally grappling with her past, childhood trauma, sexual assault, the suppression of women’s voices and embracing her sexual identity. It leaves you believing anything can be overcome, Inspiring in the true sense of the word. Courageously vulnerable and a breath of fresh air, this memoir will make you feel alive.
On Persephone’s Island by Mary Taylore-Simeti
Like a heartbeat, Taylore-Simeti’s memoir pulsates with Sicilian life. Set up to follow the seasons, each chapter overflows with sacred festivals, piquant fruits and hectic traditional family life, village feasts, mafia underbelly and tapestry of colourful neighbours.
It is a canticle of a life divided between an apartment in the energetic city of Palermo with summers devoted to life in an old family farm. Simeti weaves together the natural world (largely what happens on her farm), the Sicilian folk festivals and the news of the day, much of it having to do with the Mafia. Part of the beauty of this memoir is that she lives in Sicily as an American married to a Sicilian, yet observes the place like a traveller--a lot of the book involves her exploring ruins and little out-of-the-way towns. It's the kind of travel writing that we don't see much of anymore--it's simply a great document, not a stunt of a story structured around, say, a huge life-changing event or a similar reality-TV-like conceit.
Simeti’s writing is as abundant as the Sicilian landscape. One has only to read a few paragraphs to be stood before, "the tumbled ruins of Selinunte," or to see groves of almond, olive, Carob and lemon; the taste of wine and olive oil, and you drift into a lull as you read her lovely prose.
What are YOUR favourite travel memoirs written by women? Have we missed any? Tell us all about them in the comments!
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Katie Ness is a writer, historian and yoga teacher with a specialism in folklore and spirituality. She has a BA Hons degree in Fine Art with UCLAN, Level 4 accreditations in Prehistoric Art and The History of Folklore with Oxford University and a wealth of knowledge on Yoga history, Vedic philosophy, Hindu sacred text and art with the Oxford Centre for Hindu studies. Her MA is forthcoming.
Her writing is published in a variety of print and digital magazines, anthologies and journals such as Kindred Spirit Magazine, Witches Magazine, You Aligned, Rebelle Society, Atlas Obscura, Elephant Journal, Mulberry Literary, Haunted Magazine and more. Her book “Word Witchery” is soon to be published with Moon Books.
As an avid traveller, she has visited 25 countries so far, having backpacked around Nepal, Croatia, Vietnam and Morocco and she has temporarily lived in Cyprus, Bali and Australia. Wherever she ventures, Katie seeks out local folk traditions, lore and spiritual beliefs. Pilgrimaging to sacred or magical sites is a passion of hers whether that’s a medieval church in the UK, a Stupa in Nepal, a water temple in Sardinia or an archaeological site sacred to ancient Cyprus and more, she cherishes visiting them all. You could say she is your resident witchy wanderluster! Always finding the sacred, folkloric or magic in the mundane.
At present, she is crafting her hybrid travel memoir and learning to play the lyre harp.
Find her @katie_wild_witch
