Travel and adventure1. Anne Lister, 1791-1840 Anne Lister inherited the Shibden estate near Halifax and possessed the means to travel widely in Europe. She had first visited Paris with her aunt in 1819 but in 1824 she made her first extended visit, where she aimed to become proficient in the French language and absorbed the culture. She subsequently travelled extensively in France, visited Switzerland, the Low Countries, Germany, Scandinavia, Finland and Russia and also set foot briefly in Italy and Spain. She often deviated from the main tourist routes to visit orphanages, factories, prisons and paid as much attention to growing crops as to botanical gardens. She went down silver, coal and iron mines in France, Belgium and Sweden and boarded a smuggler's shallop to see for herself the progress of the Spanish Carlist Civil War. The first amateur mountaineer to reach the summit of Vignemale in the French Pyrenees in 1838, she found accommodation in grand hotels and private mansions, monasteries, roadside inns, peasants' hovels and even her own carriage. Her travels, described vividly in her journals, were brought abruptly to an end when she succumbed to a fever-carrying tick on 8 August 1840 in Georgia. She had planned to visit the Caucasus and the Middle East and ascend Mount Ararat.
Copyright 2004, John Hargreaves |
|
