Meg Rosoff on Isabella Bird
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 23 January 2014
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At home in Edinburgh Isabella Bird was the very picture of the ailing Victorian spinster but the moment her tiny feet hit the gangway of a steamer or squeezed into the stirrups of a horse she was transformed. Taking a doctor's advice to travel for the sake of her health Isabella headed for Australia, Japan, Korea and Hawaii before finding her spiritual home amongst the most rotten scoundrels of America's West. In 'Great Lives' the award-winning author of novels including 'How I Live Now' and 'The Bride's Farewell', Meg Rosoff explains why Isabella's transformation has inspired her books and her love of horses. She's joined by David McClay from the National Library of Scotland who maintains an archive of Isabella's colourful correspondence from the farthest flung corners of the Earth.
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in December 2013.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Once you've wrapped up this podcast, how about trying a very British cult? |
| 0:06.0 | What happens if the person you trust with your future isn't what you think they are? |
| 0:10.0 | I did feel the whole time he was watching me Yeti. I saw a footprint and that really gave me gusmas. |
| 0:16.4 | Or people who knew me. Emme, I remember every secret, every lie. I'm the only one who knows the truth. |
| 0:23.0 | Discover more of our biggest podcast from 2003. |
| 0:27.0 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:29.0 | Great Lives is a download from Radio 4. |
| 0:32.0 | We hope you enjoy what you're about to hear. |
| 0:35.0 | Today we're meeting one of the most adventurous of Victorian women, |
| 0:39.0 | a travel writer who brought a personal touch and a political edge to a new discipline, the first female fellow of the Royal |
| 0:46.0 | Geographical Society, a woman of whom the spectator said, |
| 0:50.0 | Miss Bird is an ideal traveler with a heaven-cent faculty for having adventures. |
| 0:56.3 | Traveling for travel's sake, she was the first woman to climb one of the highest volcanoes |
| 1:00.3 | in the world. |
| 1:01.6 | She travelled 8,000 miles through the Yancey Valley, rode elephants through |
| 1:05.3 | Malaya, fell in love with a one-eyed wild west desperado, and rode with Berbers in the high |
| 1:10.8 | Atlas in her late 60s. |
| 1:13.7 | Isabella is the chosen life of Meg Roseoff, one of our most celebrated writers of serious novels |
| 1:19.9 | for young people. |
| 1:21.9 | How I live now about a teenage love affair in a post-apocalyptic |
| 1:25.2 | Britain became an international bestseller. It won the Guardian Fiction Prize and has just |
| 1:30.1 | been turned into a film directed by Kevin McDonald. Her latest novel, Picture Me Gone, |
... |
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