Isabella Bishop

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Isabella Bishop

Isabella Lucy Bishop (born October 15, 1831 in Boroughbridge Hall , Yorkshire as Isabella Lucy Bird , † October 7, 1904 in Edinburgh ) was a British travel writer .

Life

Isabella Bird was born in 1831 as the eldest daughter of Pastor Edward Bird and his second wife Dora, a daughter of Pastor Marmaduke Lawson. Her sister Henrietta was born five years later.

From childhood on, Isabella Bird had repeatedly struggled with health problems. Because of a spinal disease, the doctors prescribed a lot of exercise in the fresh air, and so Bird learned to ride at a young age. In 1854, her father sent her on a boat trip to North America to visit relatives. A travelogue written by her appeared anonymously in 1856 under the title The Englishwoman in America . The following year she went on a trip to Canada and then explored Scotland. However, her next major journey did not take place until her father and mother had died.

In 1872 she set out for Australia, then traveled on to Hawaii, went to Colorado and finally rode through the Rocky Mountains in horse saddle in 1873 . It was there that Isabella Bird made the acquaintance of the adventurer Jim Nugent. The letters in which she told her sister about her travel experiences were published in Bird's most famous work, A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains . Your future ventures should also accompany travel descriptions. Although Bird did not seem to like the local climate very much, and after her return to the British island the old symptoms of illness kept recurring, she did not seem to mind the hardships of her travels or the lack of comfort.

Upon her return from America, Bird lived with her sister on the Isle of Mull, Scotland . The Edinburgh doctor John Bishop proposed marriage to her, but Bird refused. Instead, she moved to the Far East, where she toured Japan, China, Vietnam, Singapore and Malaysia. After her sister died of typhus in 1880 , she finally gave in to Bishop's courtship and married him in February 1881. John Bishop died in 1886. Her travel activities took her to the Indian subcontinent in 1889 at the age of almost sixty, she crossed Tibet and toured Persia . Kurdistan and Turkey. In 1892, Isabella Bird became the first woman to join the Royal Geographical Society . Her last major venture took her to Korea and China in 1897, where she traveled along the Yangtze River and the Han Jiang , a tributary of the Yangtze River.

Your last travel destination was Morocco, another trip to China is already being planned. A few months after her return, Isabella Bird died at her home in Edinburgh on October 7, 1904, at the age of almost 73. She found her final resting place in the Dean Cemetery of Edinburgh .

Works

Korea and Her Neighbors (1898)

literature

  • Eva Verma: The Lady and the Desperado. IB and John Nugent in: ... wherever you come from. Bi-national couples through the millennia Dipa, Frankfurt 1993 ISBN 3-7638-0196-0 (pp. 89–94)
  • Luke Gartlan: A complete Craze : Isabella Bird Bishop in East Asia. In: PhotoResearcher [Vienna: ESHPh], no. 15, April 2011 (pp. 13-26), ISSN  0958-2606

Web links

Commons : Isabella Bird  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Bishop, Isabella
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bishop, Isabella Lucy (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British travel writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 15, 1831
PLACE OF BIRTH Boroughbridge Hall , Yorkshire
DATE OF DEATH October 7, 1904
Place of death Edinburgh