Off the Beaten Track: Three Centuries of Women Travellers

This book, published by the National Portrait Gallery is the companion book to the exhibition of the same name, in London, October 2004. To be fair, it is all about the portraits, and the short biographical piece of text that accompanies each portrait.
Woman Travellers covers a fairly diverse range of women - explorers, anthropologists, archaeologists, writers, artists & scholars, and from the 18th century to the 20th century.
The narrative looks to try and tie their various and varied stories together - sometimes tentatively, and it offered only short fragments of stories as it leaps left and right from one person to another, and from one century to another. It relies heavily on a small number of the more well known ladies - Isabella Bird (Bishop), Freya Stark, Mary Kingsley, Marianne North, Gertrude Bell, Constance Gordon Cumming, and to a lesser degree Rosita Forbes & Elizabeth Rigby and Amy Johnson.
Overall I didn't find the text great - too jumpy, but it was performing a function - to transition from one woman's story to the next, so it was jumpy of necessity I guess. There was also a lot of repetition of the information in the biography within the narrative of the book. As I say at the start, it is all about the portraits, and the short biographical piece of text that accompanies each portrait, and I don't think you would lose much by reading only these.