Greetings, fellow readers! A brief project update, which I’m sure you will all be as excited about as I am.
Firstly: I have a new website to host my Very Exciting Project: Women on Adventure. I’ve spent the last couple of years researching obscure accounts of women travellers, whose professions run the gamut from soldier, to cartographer, to spy. My limitation is simple: if it was published prior to 1918, I’m interested in it!
As part of this, I’ve been aiming at publishing a number of different accounts by these women each week (and, eventually, I would like to collate these into manuscript form). You can view the updates on Facebook, or go directly to the source of goodness that is my website: http://womenonadventure.net/.
Secondly: Because I quite sincerely can’t get enough of encouraging everyone to read about these fantastic ladies’ exploits, I’ve also started up The Adventuresses’ Club Press, dedicated to popularising them. It also gives me the opportunity to write forewords to analyse their adventures from a historical and contemporary perspective — bring on the intersectionalism, sisters!
The first book published by The Adventuresses’ Club Press is The Conquest of Mount Cook, by Freda Du Faur, Australia’s first female mountaineer. As I come from a family of rock climbers and mountaineers, I was ecstatic to find an edition of her autobiographical work to share online! You can try a sample on Amazon:
The second book will be out soon–here’s your hint: it involves a nun, conquistadors, and significant amounts of swash-buckling.
Thirdly: I have a (new, first edition) niece, and over the weekend adored the opportunity to read Rebecca Solnit’s essay “The Ocean around the Archipelago” to her while she slept on me. Life goals achieved.
That’s all for now!
The Roving Book Review 
Looking forward to more awesome reading!