Books with author Isabella L. Bird

A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains is a travel book, by Isabella Bird, describing her 1873 trip to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. The book is a compilation of letters that Isabella Bird wrote to her sister, Henrietta. In 1872, Isabella left Britain, going first to Australia, then to Hawaii, which she refers to as the Sandwich Islands. In 1873 she travelled to Colorado, then the Colorado Territory. After living a time in Hawaii, she takes a boat, to San Francisco. She passed the area of Lake Tahoe, to Cheyenne, Wyoming, to ultimate Estes Park, Colorado, also elsewhere in and near the Rocky Mountains of the Colorado Territory. Early in Colorado, she met Rocky Mountain Jim, described as a desperado, but with whom she got along quite well. She described him as, "He is a man whom any woman might love but no sane woman would marry." She was the first white woman to stand atop Longs Peak, Colorado, pointing out that Jim "dragged me up, like a bale of goods, by sheer force of muscle." Rocky Mountain Jim treated her quite well, and it is sad to note, he was shot to death, seven months later. After many other adventures, Isabella Bird ultimately took a train, east. Upon publication, A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains proved an "instant bestseller" and is still considered to be her best work.

"A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains" book has a beautiful glossy cover and a blank page for the dedication. "I have found a dream of beauty at which one might look all one's life and sigh. Not lovable, like the Sandwich Islands, but beautiful in its own way! A strictly North American beauty - snow-splotched mountains, huge pines, red-woods, sugar pines, silver spruce; a crystalline atmosphere, waves of the richest color; and a pine-hung lake which mirrors all beauty on its surface. Lake Tahoe is before me, a sheet of water twenty-two miles long by ten broad, and in some places 1,700 feet deep. It lies at a height of 6,000 feet, and the snow-crowned summits which wall it in are from 8,000 to 11,000 feet in altitude. The air is keen and elastic. There is no sound but the distant and slightly musical ring of the lumberer's axe."

First published serially and then into a book in 1879, “A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains” is one of the many accounts of Isabella L. Bird’s amazing travels and adventures. Born in Yorkshire, England in 1831, Bird was never formally educated and was often sickly as a child, but she was an avid reader and loved the outdoors. In 1854, at the age of twenty-two, she left a comfortable life in England for her first trip abroad to America. She fell in love with discovering new places and defied tradition while undertaking grand adventures as an unmarried woman. Bird went onto travel to Australia and Hawaii, while publishing several accounts of her experiences, before finding her way to Colorado. “A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains”, her fourth publication and her most famous, contains the account of six months of her travels in 1873 through the rugged terrain of the Colorado Rockies. The book is based upon her colorful letters sent back home to her sister and the account relates the many hardships of the great western frontier, the unique characters she meets, and the incredible natural world she found in the newly settled western territories. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper.

Isabella L. Bird most famous book is probably A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains. Bird's time in the Rockies was enlivened especially by her acquaintance with Jim Nugent, a textbook outlaw with one eye and an affinity for violence and poetry. "A man any woman might love but no sane woman would marry," Bird declared in a section excised from her letters before their publication.

Isabella Lucy Bird won fame in her own time as the most remarkable woman traveler of the nineteenth century, and Six Months in the Sandwich Isles, in which she describes her sojourn in Hawaii in 1873, is one of the gems of Pacific literature. It is safe to say that no other book about Hawaii surpasses it in fascination. Much of the charm of Isabella's writing is due to her use of personal letters for conveying her her experiences and her impressions. The thirty-one letters that compose the book were written to her beloved sister Henrietta, who dutifully stayed at home in Edinburgh to take care of the household while Isabella was away on her travels. The book is an authentic record of daily life in Hawaii in the late nineteenth century. It describes a life style during the brief reign of King Lunalilo, not too may years before the sad reign of Queen Liliuokalani ended her dethronement by revolution. Isabella Bird met royalty, missionaries, cowboys, and ordinary, everyday Hawaiians. It is fortunate that she left such a vivid narrative of her Hawaiian Interlude.

In 1872, Isabella Bird, daughter of a clergyman, set off alone to the Antipodes 'in search of health' and found she had embarked on a life of adventurous travel. In 1873, wearing Hawaiian riding dress, she rode her horse through the American Wild West, a terrain only newly opened to pioneer settlement. The letters that make up this volume were first published in 1879. They tell of magnificent, unspoiled landscapes and abundant wildlife, of encounters with rattlesnakes, wolves, pumas and grizzly bears, and her reactions to the volatile passions of the miners and pioneer settlers. A classic account of a truly astounding journey. Isabella Lucy Bird (1831-1904) was a nineteenthcentury English traveller and writer. She was born in Boroughbridge and grew up in Tattenhall, Cheshire. She was a sickly child and spent her entire life struggling with various ailments. Much of her illness may have been psychogenic, for when she was doing exactly what she wanted she was almost never ill. Her real desire was to travel. In 1854, Bird went to visit relatives in America. She detailed the journey anonymously in her first book The Englishwoman in America (1856). She also travelled to Canada, Scotland, Australia, and Hawaii. She studied medicine and resolved to travel as a missionary. She visited missions in India, Persia, Kurdistan and Turkey. Her final journey was to China and Korea. Many of her works are compiled from letters she wrote home to her sister in Scotland. Among her books are: The Hawaiian Archipelago (1875), Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880), A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879) and Among the Tibetans (1894).

This anthology is a thorough introduction to classic literature for those who have not yet experienced these literary masterworks. For those who have known and loved these works in the past, this is an invitation to reunite with old friends in a fresh new format. From Shakespeare's finesse to Oscar Wilde's wit, this unique collection brings together works as diverse and influential as The Pilgrim's Progress and Othello. As an anthology that invites readers to immerse themselves in the masterpieces of the literary giants, it is must-have addition to any library

Isabella Bird visited the Sandwich Islands in 1871, when she was forty. Her letters home to her sister Henrietta have a remarkable freshness and spontaneity, and reveal the transformation of a Victorian invalid into a fearless horsewoman and enthusiastic mountain-climber, who thought nothing of riding for miles soaked with rain and fording terrifyingly swollen rivers.She undertook a thirteen-hour unaccompanied trek to the summit of the extinct volcano of Mauna Kea, revelling in the security with which she was able to travel and camp out without guides or companions. At the end of her stay she was able to make the perilous ascent to the summit of Mauna Loa, the largest volcano in the world, camping for the night on the edge of the crater, at nearly 14,000 feet.