Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys – A Midsummer Ramble in the Dolomites –

“Unusual among Victorian women travellers, Amelia Edwards (1831-92) was a writer first, a traveller second. By the 1860s she had published novels, poetry, stories and history, and it was not until her journey to the little-explored mountains of the South-Eastern Tyrol in 1872 that travel began to dominate her life and work.

Her ‘ramble’ with a woman companion in the Dolomites – impassable except by foot or mule and so relatively uncharted as to make the provision of food and shelter a triumph of ingenuity and good humour – was to prove a vital test of the sources demonstrated a year later on her famous trip up the Nile. She was an appreciative traveller, as observant of people and customs as she was thrilled by scenic grandeur, and she relished too the novelty, even the incongruity, of her unorthodox undertaking. ‘Your are the first travellers who have come up this ways, ‘ remarks a road worker en route, astonished at the spectacle of two upright ladies making their way side-saddle along a mountain road which is about to give out. You must be Inglese!’

Out of print since 1873, this is a wonderfully lively evocation of the spirit of one of the nineteenth century’s most celebrated women travellers.”