Girl's Ride in Iceland

In the summer of 1887, a young British woman named Ethel Brilliana Tweedie set out for Iceland with four companions, riding across a landscape most Victorians knew only from legend. This is her account of that journey: a rugged, often uncomfortable traversal of volcanic plains, glacial rivers, and remote fishing villages where tourists were still a novelty. The party battles rough seas to reach the island, then pushes inland on horseback through howling winds and punishing cold, sleeping in farmhouses and reaching the famous Geyser as it thundered into the sky much as it does today. Tweedie writes with the keen, sometimes condescending eye of her class and era, cataloging the Icelanders she meets with a mixture of puzzlement and admiration. The book captures a world on the cusp of modernity, a remote island barely touched by the industrial age, preserved in amber by one determined traveler's pen. For readers curious about how the Victorians saw the edge of the known world, this travelogue offers an incomparable window into both Iceland's past and England's assumptions.