Riding through Siberia - A Mounted Medical Mission in 1891

This immensely readable book is a mixture of adventure, extreme hardship and compassion as the author makes a 2000 mile journey along the Great Siberian Post Road. "More struggling and floundering through marshes and bogs, more pitch-dark forests, bear-alarms, and frightened horses, and then a terrific thunderstorm," she writes casually. Even though she had the support of Queen Victoria, the Empress of Russia and her Lady in Waiting, the Countess Tolstoy, not to mention a pastoral letter from Bishop Meletie of Yakutsk, nobody believed that anyone could make such a journey, least of all a woman! Kate Marsden became one of the first women to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1892.