GORDON CUMMING, Constance Frederica.

From the Hebrides to the Himalayas. A sketch of eighteen months' wanderings in western isles and eastern highlands.

London, Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1876. 2 vols, 8vo (220 x 150 mm), pp. [vi], [ix]–xi, [i], 376; viii, 364, with 27 plates; illustrations in the text; original green pictorial cloth; extremities a little worn. First edition. A presentation copy of the author’s first published book to her stepmother, inscribed ‘Jane E. Gordon Cumming with love from C. F. Gordon Cumming’. Constance’s father had married Jane Eliza in 1846, four years after the death of his first wife.The first volume recounts Gordon Cumming’s travels in the western isles of Scotland, the second her experiences in India and the Himalaya. ‘Contemporary critics, probably flabbergasted by the sheer bulk of her work, likened Miss Gordon Cumming to Isabella Bird and dubbed her one of the greatest of what Vanity Fair called “our wonderful lady travellers”. In fact she was one of that tribe Isabella Bird once professed to despise: the “globe-trotteress” ’ (Robinson). ‘None the less, the distances she travelled, the exotic locations she reached, and the sheer quantity of her output gain her a place in the history of travel’ (Oxford DNB).Robinson p. 93.

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