Barbara Hodgson’s latest quirky history book uses numerous first-person accounts, diary entries, and amusing bits of historical trivia to describe what it was like to be female and “on the road” in the days when travelling was more than a minor inconvenience. The result is a fascinating world tour that takes the reader from the heights of the Himalayas to the sands of the Sahara.

Hodgson is known for producing books resplendent with old images, drawings, and engravings from the 18th and 19th centuries. Her previous collections, Opium and In the Arms of Morpheus, explored the periods’ burgeoning drug culture. In No Place for a Lady, Hodgson adheres to a successful formula: punching up factual accounts with hundreds of reworked illustrations sourced from the Byzantium Images Archives.

The text here has a pleasing feminist “kick,” as it describes how the job of writing gave “decent” women a reason to seek folly, exotica, and adventure. Readers will find original observations made by such well-published writers as Isabella Bird, Lady Ann Fanshawe, and Anne Blunt. None of these authors was taken seriously by London’s Geographical Society, despite the fact that they endured cruel temperatures, sandstorms, starvation, and attacks by tribesmen, roaming highwaymen, and pirates. Because they were especially vulnerable to attack, the women travelled armed, sometimes in disguise, as was the case with Fanshawe, who dressed in drag as a cabin boy to escape the wrath of a band of Spanish pirates.

The point of Hodgson’s book is partly to entertain and partly to define and elaborate on the historical importance of women’s travel writing. No Place for a Lady succeeds on both counts. Just as importantly, the writers collected here offer readers a view of political events, the inconveniences of travel, and observations of “foreigners” that have been left out by male observers.