The Englishwoman in America
1856
In 1856, a young Englishwoman boards a ship alone and sails into an America that exists almost nowhere else in literature. Isabella L. Bird records her journey from Halifax to Prince Edward Island and down into the young United States with an eye that is at once exacting, funny, and unexpectedly generous. She arrives armed with Victorian preconceptions about American coarseness and chaos, then spends the next pages watching those assumptions dissolve against the sheer vitality of a continent remaking itself. What makes this book remarkable is not just its historical window onto mid-19th-century North America, but Bird's willingness to be changed by what she sees: her discomfort becomes curiosity, her snobbery becomes affection. She eats lobster with fishermen, rides through wilderness, attends church services, and records it all in prose that fizzes with intelligence. Over a century before women traveled freely, here is one who went alone and came back forever altered. For readers who love sharp travel writing, Victorian voice, or the pleasure of watching a brilliant mind unfold.
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“The captain was committed for manslaughter, but escaped the punishment due to his offence, though popular indignation was strongly excited against him.””
— Isabella L. Bird
“The silence of the forest was so solemn, that, remembering the last of the Mohicans, we should not have been the least surprised if an Indian war- whoop had burst upon our startled ears.””
— Isabella L. Bird
“broken only by the note of the distant bull-frog; meteors fell in streams of fire, the crescent””
— Isabella L. Bird
“The tea was not tempting to an English palate; it was stewed, and sweetened with molasses.””
— Isabella L. Bird
“Every one has heard of corduroy roads, but how few have experienced their miseries! They are generally used for traversing swampy ground, and are formed of small pine-trees deprived of their branches, which are laid across the track alongside each other. The wear and tear of travelling soon separates these, leaving gaps between; and when, added to this, one trunk rots away, and another sinks down into the swamp, and another tilts up, you may imagine””
— Isabella L. Bird
“where windows ought to have been were screened by heavy curtains of tarnished moose-deer hide.””
— Isabella L. Bird
“Books alone are cheap and abundant, being the American editions of pirated English works.””
— Isabella L. Bird
“The telegraph costs about 20_l._ per mile,””
— Isabella L. Bird
“There were also numerous blacks in the streets, and, if I might judge from the brilliant colours and good quality of their clothing, they must gain a pretty good living by their industry. A large number of these blacks and their parents were carried away from the States by one of our admirals in the war of 1812, and landed at Halifax. The capital of Nova Scotia looks like a town of cards, nearly all the buildings being of wood.””
— Isabella L. Bird
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Bird, Isabella L.. The Englishwoman in America. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-englishwoman-in-america-37e4fadd-9b58-4d08-9c4d-48c67fdb9d62.Bird, I. L. (1856). The Englishwoman in America. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-englishwoman-in-america-37e4fadd-9b58-4d08-9c4d-48c67fdb9d62Bird, Isabella L.. The Englishwoman in America. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-englishwoman-in-america-37e4fadd-9b58-4d08-9c4d-48c67fdb9d62.
