Historical travel writing: five favorite books by cultural writer/producer Anastasia Ashman

Five Favorite Books is a special feature at the LA Books Examiner in which our favorite authors share and discuss their five favorite books within a category. In this edition, Anastasia Ashman, cultural writer and producer, discusses her five favorite historical travel writing books.

Historical travel writing: five favorite books by Anastasia Ashman

Long-term travelers, expatriates and global citizens often struggle to make sense of life's evolutions abroad, as well as find meaningful access to their new surroundings. As a world traveler and 13-year expat in three countries, I’ve come to crave a certain type of book. 

Whether I’m simply passing through, or putting down roots in a place, historical travelogue and portraits of adventurous women travelers who came before me often helps connect me to the land, and remind me of the transformative tradition of female travel.  

Since I coedited the anthology Tales from the Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey, I’ve become convinced some of the most powerful cultural wisdom pools at the intersection of women and travel.

1) Unsuitable for Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellers, selected by Jane Robinson
In this spunky companion volume to Wayward Women (her book about women travel writers through history), Robinson collects the global travels of 200 women across 16 centuries – from the obscure to better known authors like Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Karen Blixen, Freya Stark and Jan Morris. Grouped by geography with numerous entries for each place which serve as a conversation between the region, the time and the characters themselves, the chapters are bookended by thoughtful selections in "Setting Out”"and "Coming Home”" indicating that the act of travel is and has always been a transformative force in women's lives. Sometimes reputation risking and life threatening, but often culturally redeeming and personally empowering, travel must be intellectually prepared for, and assimilated.

2) Veiled Half-Truths: Western Travellers’ Perceptions of Middle Eastern Women, selected and annotated by Judy Mabro (1991)
A politicized and rigorous survey of the depictions of 'Oriental' women in the writings of 18^th, 19^th and 20^th century European travel books, memoirs, and guides about North Africa, Egypt, the Holy Land, and Turkey. It's fascinating to note the degree to which the writers' own prejudices about the region, Muslim culture, the veil, the harem -- and the place of women in society in general -- colored their descriptions and their conclusions. These skewed first-hand accounts then influenced or reinforced the stereotypes being embraced back home, and even though the sources have faded the perceptions endure today. 

3) Adventurous Women in South East Asia: Six Lives, edited by John Gullick (1995) 
Part of the terrific Oxford-in-Asia series, this easy-reading collection by various scholars examines the lives of 19^th century Western women in the Asian tropics – pioneers like Sophia Raffles, the calamity-stricken wife of the British founder of Singapore, and Isabella Bird, the opinionated world traveler seeking to escape from civilization. It helped put into context my own struggling expatriate experience when I was living in steamy Malaysia... I especially appreciated reading about the dark side of these women's lives, like the widely unknown and checkered past of Anna Leonowens, the famous governess hired by the King of Siam! Illustrated with fine engravings from the women's own publications.

4) Dreaming of East: Western Women and the Exotic Allure of the Orient, Barbara Hodgson (2006) 
For generations of Western women, Eastern travel has signified freedom. Yet in the more 'liberal’'West this does not compute. How can the cloistered East be a place of emancipation? Through a series of portraits of 18^th to 20^th century women who traveled to the eastern Ottoman empire – Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Iraq and Turkey – Hodgson demonstrates the calculus. Among Eastern liberties counted by women like Isabel Burton, the wife of adventurer Richard Burton: 'the inconsequence of time' and the loose clothing. The Canadian author is a book designer, and the engravings, paintings, sketches and photographs make this book a jewel to behold.

5) Cultures in Dialogue series
Now that I'm living in Turkey, the nightstand is crowded with books by and about Western women in this Eastern nation, from the 18th century Turkish Embassy Letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montague -- some call it the first expat literature of Turkey, and credit her with bringing news of Ottoman hygiene to the European courts -- to more contemporary accounts, like Mary Lee Settle’s lyrical Turkish Reflections (a modern archaeology of the country) and Carla Grissman’s visceral snapshot of 1960s rural life, Dinner of Herbs. Still more books come from the Cultures in Dialogue series compiled by Reina Lewis and Teresa Heffernan, two scholars who analyze antique writings by American and British women about their travels in Turkey. I like how the two editors show foreign women interacted with their Turkish counterparts and entered the socio-political dialogue of the times.

Anastasia Ashman is a writer/producer of cultural entertainment and a hybrid identity adventuress. She founded the neoculture hub expat+HAREM, the global niche and produced the Near East's first Global Nomad Salon, part of an intellectual dinner party series the Economist calls "jetsetters with a conscience." Upcoming projects include a memoir, enhanced ebooks and a graphic novel for iPad. The native of counterculture Berkeley, California combines a decade of work in New York and Los Angeles mainstream media and entertainment with a Bryn Mawr degree in Classical and Near Eastern archaeology.

Check out The Summer Issue of expat+HAREM's Istanbul culture web carnival.