Böcker i Cambridge Library Collection - Travel, Europe-serien

The writer, satirist and poet Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had an inexhaustible appetite for travel and society. This third edition of her Letters and Works (1866), offers valuable insight into the ambitions and frustrations of one of the most unconventional women of the eighteenth century.

Hester Piozzi's 1789 Observations of her travels around Europe with her second husband is a witty and fascinating account, full of conversational anecdotes and local colour, which today make it a valuable work of social history, as well as the entertaining travel book that it was originally intended to be.

The writer and translator Anne Plumptre (1760-1818) published this three-volume description of three years' residence in France in 1810. Volume 1 describes her stay in Paris (where she was accidentally locked in the ruins of the Bastille at nightfall), and her journey to Marseilles via Lyons.

Published in 1895, this book documents William Conway's celebrated 65-day journey across the European Alps in 1894. Accompanied by two Gurkha soldiers, Conway climbed twenty-one peaks, including Mont Blanc, the Jungfrau and Grossglockner, and traversed thirty-nine mountain passes.

First published in English in 1861, during the golden age of alpinism and travel writing, this work by Hermann Alexander Berlepsch (1814?-83) was translated from German by Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), a renowned British mountaineer in his day. The book is a scientific and cultural guidebook to the Alps.

In this 1842 work, the artist and zoologist George French Angas (1822-86) blends antiquarian notes on temples and castles with picturesque descriptions of natural history. Incorporating fourteen illustrations, this book displays the charm and diversity that defines the best nineteenth-century travel writing.

Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington (1789-1849), was famous for her charm and wit, which are reflected in this three-volume travel narrative, first published in 1839-40. The work contains vivid pictures of Italian cities, and Blessington also reminisces about meetings with Lord Byron, who became a close friend.

The American zoologist, physiologist and naturalist Samuel Kneeland (1821-88) published this account of his travels through the Scottish islands and to Iceland in 1876. It shows the breadth of his interests, from the Norse origins and history of the Icelanders to volcanoes, their geological causes, and their flora and fauna.

The romantic novelist Elizabeth Strutt (1783-c.1863) published this guidebook for the unaccompanied 'lady traveller' in 1828. Strutt's carefully-observed account of an eventful journey provides an unusual perspective both on European customs and society of her time, and on the mindset of the British travellers who witnessed them.

In the late 1830s Elizabeth Rigby (1809-1893) travelled alone from London to the Baltic States via Denmark and Russia; a remarkable undertaking for a single woman in the first half of the nineteenth century. Her collection of letters focusing on life in Estonia particularly was published in 1841.