Down to the Golden Chersonese: Victorian Lady Travellers

Louise E. Allin, a poet and short-story writer, is also an English instructor at Cambrian College.

In this poetic interpretation of the travels of five Victorian ladies,
Holmes achieves a captivating blend of history, feminism, and language.
Except for Mary Darwin, her travellers are not well known, but that is
perhaps more charming. In the inner and outer realms of human
experience, the reader follows them willingly from England to the
American Wild West to the Sandwich Isles, South Africa, and Mount Fuji.

She excels in combining compelling images: “I am growing deaf with
vegetation. . . . The gallery at Kew / will take my paintings. / I must
entice ten thousand people / to glide in and out / my folds of oil.”
Or “My nerves are / long grey streets of stone / that choke in
bone.” Or “the nameless bone / in her body / levers out the last
child.”

The single short story in the collection, “The Ascent of Fuji the
Peerless,” is a matchless study in sexual frustration and sublimation.
Holmes is as fine in fiction as in poetry and her sheer descriptive
powers all the more marvelous.

For all their differences in motives for travelling—adventure, escape
from loneliness, social causes, or self-knowledge—these women brought
to their quests a timeless feminine sensibility that eclipsed their own
Victorian era. Holmes captures this triumph of the spirit and
reinterprets it for us in excellent poetry and prose.