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"Imagine, madam, a plain which never seems to end," wrote Lady Hester Stanhope in a letter to a friend in 1813, "where you travel eight or nine hours together. It will be in vain to seek a bush or tree for any little purpose." Her solution to the delicate challenge of nature's calls? "Pitch up your tent... saying you wish to repose or eat."
The niece of the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, Hester Stanhope spent years wandering around the Middle East as a self- appointed "Queen of the Desert". After losing her entire wardrobe in a shipwreck, she took to dressing like a Turkish man. This was not a woman who was going to wear a veil.
She is one, but by no means the most eccentric, of many women featured in Off the Beaten Track, an exhibition of "three centuries of women travellers" opening at the National Portrait Gallery this week. "They were all sorts really," says Jan Morris in her foreword to Dea Birkett's accompanying book:...