"Stoddart has portrayed for us, as few could have done, the untirable and brilliant mind... of Isabella Bird Bishop." - Blackwood's Magazine (1906)
"Bird for a time abandons her mother country...finds pleasure in savage culture...Stoddart praises Bird's strength." - The Right Sort of Woman: Victorian Travel Writers (2012)
"A biography of absorbing interest, the story of a life that will not soon be forgotten."-Bookman (1906)
"No biography of the season is likely to interest a wider circle...every page...throws light on a truly remarkable career." -British Weekly (1906)
"Stoddart adds a list of Isabella's qualities...courage, endurance, the love of adventure, the power to overcome difficulties." - In-between Two Worlds: Narratives by Female Explorers (2009)
"Stoddard suggests had Bird's courage not ridden above [spinal disease], she might have delivered herself over to confirmed ill-health and adorned a sofa all her days." - A Curious Life for a Lady: The Story of Isabella Bird (2015)
"Stoddart has written...with much discretion...Isabella Bird, the famous traveller, was one of the really remarkable figures of the later nineteenth century." -Spectator
"Stoddart, Isabella's devoted friend and first biographer quoted her recollection of those happy days riding." - On Top of the World: Five Women Explorers in Tibet (1984)
Isabella Bird's life was certainly one of the most remarkable in all the varied record of English travel during the late 19th century. In her 1908 book "The Life of Isabella Bird," Anna Stoddart made excellent use of an unusually good opportunity. She enjoyed Isaella's close friendship and thus had access to all the available manuscripts and letters.
The result is a biography of absorbing interest, the story of a life that will not soon be forgotten. Stoddart has portrayed for us, as few could have done the untirable and brilliant mind of one of the most remarkable figures of the later 19th Century.
As the Literary World noted about Isabella's travels, "there is not one woman in a thousand capable of achieving such an adventure, or indeed who would be likely to live to tell the story of it."
Often entirely alone, with no little experience of life in the rough, fearless and resolute, an accomplished horsewoman, possessed of a ready tact which enabled her to fit into the most incongruous and difficult circumstances, she carried herself everywhere with unfailing dignity while traveling the Rocky Mountains, Australia, Hawaii, Japan, Malaysia, China, Korea, Iran, Kurdistan, and Morocco.
Isabella would gain widespread notoriety for her narratives of these travels in the following books:
• A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains
• Korea and Her Neighbours;
• Unbeaten Tracks in Japan;
• The Yangtze Valley and Beyond;
• The Englishwoman in America;
• Six Months in the Sandwich Islands
• The Hawaiian Archipelago
• Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan
• Among the Tibetans
In introducing Isabella's biography, Anna Stoddart writes, "I have sought to present her as I knew her.... she nearly always conquered her territories alone; she faced the wilderness almost singlehanded; she observed and recorded without companionship. She suffered no toil to impede her, no study to repel her. She triumphed over her own limitations of health and strength as over the dangers of the road.
"Nor did she ever lose, in numberless rough vicissitudes, in intercourse with untutored peoples, or in the strenuous dominance which she was repeatedly compelled to exercise, her womanly graces of tranquil manner, gentle voice, reasonable persuasiveness."
About the author:
Anna M. Stoddart (1840-1911) was a close lifelong friend of Isabella Bird and became well-known as an author of biographies. Her biographical books include:
• Elizabeth Pease Nichol
• Francis of Assisi
• John Stuart Blackie. A biography
• Life and letters of Hannah E. Pipe
• The life of Paracelsus
• Sir Philip Sidney, servant of God
