THE SOLO TRAVELLER

Lilian Leland was just 25 when she set out from New York in 1884 to travel the globe and write.

Her subsequent book, Traveling Alone: A Woman’s Journey Around the World (1890) recounts adventures in a wide range of destinations: from Chile and Hawaii, to Egypt, Japan, Turkey, India … and Singapore.

One critic said: “Leland was not eager to immortalise her name by attempting to add one more to the long list of tedious guide books, but wrote in a delightfully free and offhand fashion.”

This off-hand approach is evident from her very first sentence about Singapore:

“It requires a stretch of the imagination to believe it is in fact November, for the temperature here is suggestive of ovens.”

She then follows up with this line about the local fauna:

“I haven’t observed any sociable cobras or boa constrictors in my hotel room yet, but, as the Irishman said, ‘I have great hopes.’”

More interesting, perhaps, is her account of how she was treated at Singapore’s Hotel D’Europe, where clearly the staff hadn’t seen too many solo women travellers in their time…

Dear me, what a dreadful thing it is to be a woman and to travel alone! I have thrown the hotel quite into a commotion. The unhappy clerk is in a pitiable state. He comes to my room and closes a shutter of my window that somebody in an adjacent room might possibly look through by partially dislocating his neck, and explains apologetically that there is so much curiosity and they ask him so many questions.

He also inquires doubtfully what my business is and I reply by way of reassuring him that I travel for my health, and to write. The table is at the time strewn with my manuscript, so the reply is eminently satisfactory.

He thinks that I ought to feel strange and frightened at being alone in a hotel, so he escorts me upstairs and downstairs to the table and back again. What a shocking sinful thing a woman is, to be whisked away and tucked into a back room, out of sight. I ought evidently to blush for my womanhood. But I don’t. On the contrary, I glory in it. I have come so far in comfort and safety, and I feel every day more confidence in myself and the innate goodness of human nature.

You can read more of the book online at Google Books – just search for “Lilian Leland”.