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Isabella Lucy BirdThe Englishwoman in America (April 23, 2008)

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LibriVox recording of The Englishwoman in America by Isabella Lucy Bird . Read by Sibella Denton

Isabella Bird travels abroad in Canada and the United States in the 1850s. As an Englishwoman and a lone female, she travels as far as Chicago, Prince Edward Island, and Cincinatti. Her observations on the trials and tribulations of the journeys are astute, if formed by her place and time in history. Adventures with pickpockets, omnibuses, cholera, and rat invested hotels deter her not. (Sibella Denton)

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This audio is part of the collection: The LibriVox Free Audiobook Collection
It also belongs to collections: Audio Books & Poetry; Community Audio

Artist/Composer: Isabella Lucy Bird
Date: 2008-04-23
Source: Librivox recording of a public-domain text
Keywords: non fiction; isabella; bird; journey; travels; audio books; librivox

Creative Commons license: Public Domain

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Reviewer: Roman100 - - October 10, 2011
Subject: An Absorbing Read
The book is a 19th-century travelogue covering the young author's summertime travels in the mid-1850s through the eastern Canadian Maritime provinces (excepting Newfoundland) and parts of what are, in the present day, the provinces of Quebec and Ontario. She also visited New England in the USA and travelled west by train as far as Cincinnati, Ohio, then swinging north to Detroit and thence back into a Canada that was, in that period, still a colony of Britain. The nascent, but already solid City of Toronto held, at the time, only a few tens of thousands of residents!

Well-educated, astute, fearless and with an ability to synthesize - to sift out chaff from what she sees around her and pick out the valuable nuggets - she reports a great many interesting vignettes within her purview that bring to life some of the aspects of that period.

Regrettably certain lacunae mar the report's excellence. At the start of her visit in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick, she fails to record the fact of "Le Grand Dérangement" (The Great Upheaval) of 1755. At that date, the British rounded up and expelled to the four corners of the earth the owners of the land who were French-speaking Acadians, an industrious agrarian folk. These, and their descendants, are deprived forever of the right to reclaim what had been theirs.

The epic poem "Evangeline" by Longfellow, published in 1847, commemorates this tragedy. Since the author describes in her book her cordial meeting with this very poet in Boston, at a date only a few years after the poem's publication, it seems odd indeed that she passes Longfellow's trademark work, and the barbaric events it deplores, under a veil of dead silence.

Her account falls short yet again in still another aspect. She seems not to have learned much, if anything, about the French/English divide between Upper and Lower Canada that manifests itself even unto the present day. She shows no empathy but rather a disdain for a sector of the Canadian population that was French-speaking and possessed "alien" customs quite different than her own; a sector that had, moreover, been seething under such exploitation under their British conquerors that there had been armed insurrection some 15 years earlier - a fact she ignores.

When visiting Montreal she carries a letter of introduction to the "Bishop of Montreal" who turns out to be, we learn only by inference, an Anglican bishop, not a Catholic (French-Canadian) one from the majority of the population, who consequently could only have spoken for (and introduced her to) a tiny sector of the Chrisitan flock in that city. That made for great fun but it could hardly have been conducive to penetrating insights.

The same blinkered stance leading to truncated outcome continues on to Quebec City, where she partakes of the dizzying social whirl but only in the company of the English winners of the battle between Generals Wolfe (English) and Montcalm (French). Yet Quebec City was then, and is now still, the fortress of French-Canadian culture! She pridefully reports on an obelisk erected to Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham near the Citadel on which were written the words "Here died Wolfe victorious" but, ungallantly, utters not a word about the defeated Montcalm who had been also a general of distinction.

Perhaps, in her defence, one may conclude that she did not speak French, and would have found it impossible communicating with this important sector of the population in order to get a sense of its pulse. But regrettably, she contents herself instead with turning up her nose at the incomprehensible "patois" that she heard all around her - the usual attempt to slough off linguistic ignorance. Shades of an American in Vietnam!

In counterpoint, her detailed overview of the City of New York, and also that of Boston, presented in Chapters 16 and 17, really carries the day for me and puts her talents in high relief. This is a tour-de-force that includes a sympathetic focus on positive but rarely-mentioned traits of American culture of that era and it certainly merits to be remarked upon and preserved.

I must also compliment the excellent reader, Sibella Denton, for rendering the book so well with her pleasantly mellifluous voice. Even in some of the chapters where the cadence of her reading seemed to speed up, possibly due to the sheer length of the material at hand, I found this did not diminish one's interest in any way. How extraordinarily well done. Her reading complements perfectly this travelogue and I strongly recommend it.

Reviewer: alamedared - - April 25, 2008
Subject: Terrific Travelogue!!
This is an amazing first hand account of travels in 19th century America and Canada. I learned so many new things--- as if I were right there. The fear of getting cholera was fascinating to find out about as was the author's interaction with Native Canadians in their wigwams. Very well read too. Don't miss this one!