Illustrated Daughters of Britannia [Hardcover]

For those who enjoy reading about travel and life abroad, this enormously entertaining social history of the female side of diplomatic life is a must. The author, herself the daughter of a diplomat, closely observed her mother's 28 years on the road. Drawing on published memoirs, letters, diaries, interviews and personal reminiscences, Hickman's (A Trip to the Light Fantastic: Travels with a Mexican Circus) written account ranges from the 17th through the 20th centuries. Organizing her anecdotes around various aspects of the diplomatic life, such as "getting there," "private lives," and "hardships," rather than by time period, the author contrasts the experiences of individual women (although it is occasionally difficult to keep track of who's who). When her husband was posted to Teheran in 1849, Mary Sheil discovered that she was virtually confined to the luxurious but isolated British residence. On the other hand, Harriet Granville, whose husband was posted to Paris in the 1820s, found herself devoting most of her time to diplomatic ceremonies. Many of the women had to cope with either unfamiliar food or a severe lack of food. Miss Tully (first name unknown) left letters describing the effects of pestilence and famine on her life in 1784 Tripoli. Often women were placed in danger by their position, for example Veronica Atkinson, whose family was caught up in the Romanian Revolution of 1989. Feelings of homesickness and other difficulties were common, yet Hickman presents most of the wives as enjoying adventurous lives that she describes as "quite exciting really." Photos. Agent, Gill Coleridge. (June 6)Forecast: Given its Anglocentric subject, this delightful book will be less widely reviewed here than it was in England. This may prevent it from reaching its full audience.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

This book sheds light on some women who have previously appeared as little more than footnotes in history while also drawing on the experiences of better-known figures, such as Vita Sackville-West and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. As Hickman points out, these women's writings and experiences are often far more interesting to current readers than those of the men they accompanied to remote parts of the world as official representatives of the great British Empire. Through private letters, diaries, memoirs, and interviews, Hickman provides glimpses into the exotic, often painfully lonely worlds of diplomatic wives, sisters, and daughters dating from the mid-17th century up to modern times. Structured in chapters that encapsulate the various aspects of these women's lives abroad ("Getting There," "Private Life," "Children," "Hardships," etc.), the book relates both great adventure and desolate boredom, the grandiose and the absurd. Although this book was obviously written for a British audience (published in the U.K. in 1999, it was a London Times best seller), it will engage North American readers as well. It is scholarly but eminently readable and is suitable for academic women's studies collections and larger public libraries. Shauna Rutherford, Univ. of Calgary Lib., Alberta
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Books about the "art" of diplomacy and the men who practice it are rarely the stuff of stirring adventure, especially for nonspecialists. So a book about their wives may sound even more numbing. Yet Hickman, born into a diplomatic family, has written a delightful work full of delicious anecdotes and superb insights into the joys and travails of living among alien peoples. Hickman traces the evolution of diplomacy from its inception in Renaissance Italy to modern times. Along the way, she introduces readers to a cast of interesting and often indomitable women who shared their husbands' joys, adventures, and even dangers. She includes relatively famous women, such as Isabel Burton, and many obscure but still vital and dedicated "servants of the Empire." This outstanding work is part history, part travelogue, and fully enjoyable. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Her last book, A Trip to the Light Fantastic, received extraordinarily good reviews: 'The most ambitiously imaginative sort of travel writing' - Patrick Skene Catling 'Magic is at the heart of Hickman's narrative. Her characters would not seem out of place in the oeuvre of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende' - Sunday Times 'Mexico will not have been portrayed more vividly since Graham Greene's The Lawless Roads! Enchanting' - Geoffrey Moorhouse, Daily Telegraph --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Accompanying their spouses in the most extraordinary, tough, sometimes terrifying circumstances, this book is an account of the courageous and unusual women who have been the backbone of the foreign service. Women who struggled to bring their civilization with them. The book is illustrated with archive material, extracts from original letters between the women and their families at home, maps to show the routes they travelled and the places they were posted to and pictures of ephemera to evoke the lives they led. The chapters cover: getting there; the posting; private life; embassy life; public life; and social life.

Katie Hickman was born into a diplomatic family in 1960 and has spent more than twenty-five years living abroad in Europe, the Far East and Latin America. She is the author of three previous books: A Trip to the Light Fantastic - Travels with a Mexican Circus, which was one of the Independent`s 1993 Books of the Year and was shortlisted for the 1994 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; The Quetzal Summer, a novel set in the Andes, for which she was short-listed for the 1993 Sunday TImes Young British Writer of the Year Award, and Dreams of the Peaceful Dragon - A Journey Into Bhutan. She is featured in the Oxford University Press guide to women travellers, Wayward Women.