“No Place For A Lady” | The Extraordinary Life of Isabella Bird
Defying Victorian convention, Isabella Bird was a pioneering explorer and adventurer – circling the globe, climbing volcanoes and riding with outlaws, decades before British women even had the right to vote.
Isabella Bird was born in 1831, into a society quite different from today. Middle-class Victorian England had very strict gender roles; a woman's place was in the home, serving her husband and raising their children. But she simply wasn't made that way. Long before women had the right to vote or own property in their own name, she circled the globe – climbing mountains, meeting outlaws and encountering remote tribes as she went. Writing about her exploits in a series of bestselling books, she captured the imagination of the age and still serves as an inspiration to adventurers everywhere.
A portrait of Isabella Bird in later life, a wood engraved illustration from 1891.
A Sickly Start
The daughter of Reverend Edward Bird, Isabella was born into polite society and seemed destined to be married off to a wealthy husband or sent to work as a governess. A sickly child, she was diagnosed with nervous headaches, insomnia, melancholia (or depression as we would now recognise it), and a severely painful spinal complaint. Doctors recommended an alternating combination of bed rest and fresh air. This mix of remedies resulted in a childhood spent avidly reading in bed or out exploring the countryside. Her father taught her to ride, and they explored on horseback together, studying the world around them.
In 1850, on the cusp of adulthood, she had a fibrous tumour removed from her spine. With medicine not quite what it is today, this would have been a traumatic experience; although she was given laudanum (an opiate-based painkiller), with no general anaesthetic, she would have been conscious throughout. The surgery went some way to alleviate her symptoms, but a herniated disc meant she was still in a lot of discomfort for much of the time. With her health largely unimproved, her father gave her £100 and, on doctor's orders, she set off across the Atlantic to see if travel would ease her ailments.
First Travels
During the trip, her steamer sailing between St John's, Newfoundland, and Portland in Maine became caught in a terrible storm. The lights went out and the engines died. The ship would have been helpless, thrown through the waves like a leaf in the wind. Isabella was certain she was going to die. But rather than go under, this near-death experience invigorated her. She later wrote that she "felt that a new era of my existence had begun."
Not only did this trip awaken her wanderlust, she also discovered a talent for writing. Whilst away, she penned her first book, An Englishwoman in America, recounting her travels from the moment she set foot on the ship leaving England to her return. This first-person narrative about places most women in polite society only dreamt about made it an instant success, launching her writing career.
Travel in Earnest
When her father died in 1858 and then her mother in 1866, Isabella had to start supporting herself, which she did through her writing. She took some shorter trips, including to the Mediterranean and a particularly uninspiring visit to Australia, where she found the culture as oppressive as the England she'd left behind.
‘The Pau or Hawaiian Ladies' Holiday Riding Dress’, an engraving from Isabella Bird’s 1875 book “The Hawaiian archipelago: six months among the palm groves, coral reefs, and volcanoes of the Sandwich islands”. Such sights may have influenced her decision to ride astride a horse rather than side-saddle, contrary to the ‘ladylike’ convention of the Victorian age.
Undeterred, by the early 1870s she began a significant period of travel, including climbing the volcanoes of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Without the equipment we have today, her shoes were burnt through on the lava fields below, but she was clearly taken by the experience: "The words of common speech are quite useless. It is unimaginable, indescribable, a sight to remember for ever..."
During the trip, she learned to ride astride rather than side-saddle. This may seem a small detail, but for the Victorians, it was unheard of – women simply didn't do that sort of thing. It was hugely liberating, and she found that riding without contorting her body for hours on end did wonders for the back complaints that had plagued her for most of her life. It's difficult not to think that years of side-saddle riding had caused or exacerbated those back problems far more than necessary.
Contemporary engraving of Isabella Bird circa 1873. She became an accomplished horsewoman, even picking up work as a rancher or cowgirl while she was in the American West.
Wild West
Her new way of riding meant she became known as ‘the Englishwoman who rode as well as a man’. Travelling to the lawless west of America, she refused to acknowledge her supposed 'place in society', mixing with immigrant workers, outlaws, bandits, and chancers all trying to make a life in a tough, uncompromising world. She was an oddity – clearly unconcerned with what society thought of her, she took on the work of men, even wrangling cattle to earn her keep. In just three months, she rode over 800 miles through the Rocky Mountains, encountering grizzly bears and rattlesnakes as she went.
Isabella Bird’s cabin, an engraving from her 1882 book “A Lady's life in the Rocky Mountains”.
Rocky Mountain Jim
Perhaps one of the most intriguing parts of Isabella's life was her relationship with James Nugent, better known as Rocky Mountain Jim. In many ways, it was a modern relationship – much more akin to two adults dating than the arranged or protracted courtships of the day.
Jim was quite taken by Isabella and proposed to her at least once during their time together. It is clear from her writing that she was torn, describing him as "a man any woman might love but no sane woman would marry."
He was charming, chivalrous, and fiercely intelligent – qualities that would have drawn a woman like Isabella to him. She also describes his profile as if it could have been chiselled from marble. The other side of his face, however, told a different story. A grizzly bear attack had all but destroyed it: he was missing an eye, and heavy scar tissue covered what remained. By all accounts, most people were shocked by his appearance. His character, too, was similarly two-sided. Charming one minute, he was a mercurial alcoholic, given to foul tempers, brawling and arguing wherever he went. Isabella wrote:
"His life, in spite of a certain dazzle which belongs to it, is a ruined and wasted one, and one asks what good can the future have in store for one who has so long chosen evil?"
A year after she wrote those words, Rocky Mountain Jim died in a gun battle – probably shot by a fellow rancher and guide, or possibly a love rival.
A coloured and engraved map of Asia from 1908. Isabella Bird travelled widely across the region, making extended journeys through China, Korea and Japan.
The Door to Japan
In 1878, Isabella was given a rare opportunity to travel to Japan. The country had only recently emerged from centuries of strict isolation – for more than 250 years, it had traded with only a handful of countries, mostly close neighbours. Ukiyo-e prints depicting geishas, samurai and everyday life were among the few cultural exports; otherwise, Japan was essentially closed to the world. For someone with a mind like Isabella's, the pull must have been enormous.
The country still had very strict laws for visitors, who were typically confined to the large urban centres. But Isabella managed to bypass much of the red tape thanks to British diplomat Harry Parkes, who had arranged the trip and secured permissions to explore the interior of the country – territory few westerners, let alone western women, had ever reached.
Travel was difficult; there was only one small section of rail track and few proper roads. She wrote:
"The 'main road' often plunges into deep bogs, at others is roughly corduroyed with the roots of trees, and frequently hangs over the edge of abrupt and much-worn declivities."
Almost wherever she went, she attracted curious onlookers. In remote villages, people followed at a polite distance; at one point, up to a thousand people gathered simply to stare at someone so removed from their culture. She circled the entire country, travelling 4,500 kilometres from south of Osaka up to Biratori in the far north – home to the mysterious Ainu.
The Ainu are a people indigenous to Japan and Russia, genetically much closer to the populations of Siberia than to the Yamato Japanese who make up around 98% of Japan's population today. Isabella was deeply curious about them, but they did not return that curiosity. In contrast to the crowds and stares she encountered elsewhere in Japan, they treated her with cool indifference.
‘Ainus of Yezo’, an engraved illustration from the frontispiece of Bird’s 1885 book “Unbeaten Tracks in Japan”.
Perhaps as a consequence of this, much of her writing about the Ainu – extensive given how briefly she was among them – comes across as superior and quite judgemental. She describes them as a 'stupid race' and shows little respect for their cultural values. It is writing that reflects the colonial attitudes of her age even as it jars with a modern reader. That said, her accounts of their way of life give us a valuable window into a culture that has since all but vanished.
Loss, Love and Legacy
After a trip to what is now Malaysia, Isabella returned home to a complicated personal life. Her sister had fallen seriously ill, and her doctor, John Bishop – a man more than ten years Isabella's junior – was caring for her. But it was in vain; her sister died of typhoid. Within six months of her sister's death, Isabella and John married. This happiness, too, was short-lived. Still in his early forties, John received a blood transfusion – a pioneering procedure at the time – but before blood groups and compatibility were understood. It led to complications that ultimately cost him his life.
Distraught but determined, Isabella channelled her grief and John's considerable inheritance into something lasting. She studied medicine and travelled as a missionary, founding two hospitals in India: the John Bishop Memorial Hospital in Srinagar, and the Henrietta Bird Hospital in Amritsar, named after her beloved sister.
Having been profiled and published in journals and magazines for decades, Bird had, by then, become a household name. In 1890, she became the first woman to be awarded Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. Two years later, she became the first woman allowed to join the Royal Geographical Society.
A 1901 photograph of Isabella Bishop (nee Bird), aged 70. Her final great journey was in 1897, when she voyaged up the Yangtze and Han rivers in China and Korea, but she continued to travel almost right up until her death.
But perhaps Isabella's greatest legacy is her writing. She travelled not only where no woman had gone before, but often where no westerner had ever been. Some of her attitudes sit uncomfortably when viewed through a modern lens, but her books remain vivid documents of a particular moment in history – when travel was slow, the world was vast, and a woman doing any of this at all was truly extraordinary. Her fearless spirit and refusal to be defined by illness or expectation still speak to adventurers everywhere.
Dave Hamilton is a writer, photographer, forager and explorer of historic sites and natural places. He is the author of multiple books, including "Where the Wild Things Grow: the Foragers Guide to the Landscape", “Wild Ruins” and “Wild Ruins BC”. His latest book, “Weird Guide Britain”, published by Wild Things Publishing, is out in May 2026.
