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29 ______________________________________ It is easy to characterize Adela as yet another of those intrepid women travelers that Victorian society produced. These women shared a number of characteristics. They tended to be unmarried and without family obligations. Their parents were either deceased or, if they needed looking after, someone else saw to them. The women were usually financially independent, often having inherited from their parents. They traveled for different purposes, but to all of them travel represented a degree of freedom and choice they could not have as readily in England. All of these characteristics are true of Adela. But her travel quickly took on a more speci fic intent. She was traveling to learn and study. She had always been interested in antiquities and ruins, and for her Mexico was a vast field school. From the first her work was important. And she did consider it her work; her travel, her reading , and her study had a specific intent. She was increasingly drawn to the Pre-Hispanic ruins, and eventually she applied her artistic abilities to very specialized work. Few of the other women travelers had such a strong focus on work, and fewer still were committed to antiquities and archaeology. One traveler who did focus on antiquities was Amelia Edwards, who was almost twenty years older than Adela. She was instrumental in establishing the Egypt Exploration Fund, and she wrote and lectured extensively on Egyptology. Her work earned her several honorary degrees from American universities but no academic recognition in England. On her death in 1892 she bequeathed a chair of Egyptology to University College, London. She lived near Adela, but there is no record of the two women meeting or corresponding . Adela likely knew of her, however. The artist and botanist Marianne North was another woman whose work gave her a professional identity. Certain types of art, like certain types of writing, were an acceptable accomplishment for a Victorian gentlewoman. Botanizing was genteel enough as well, and many a Victorian drawing room was equipped with books of pressed flowers and pretty flower paintings. Marianne North took the genre well Chapter Six Refining the Focus As you say, it is very nice “to have a definite object in life” . . . —Adela Breton to Miss Mead, March ,  30 Chapter Six ______________________________________ beyond the drawing room level, however, and her adventuresome, independent travel to paint plants in their natural settings indicates a passion for her work that characterizes Adela as well. Similarly, the flamboyant Margaret Fountaine moved beyond the genteel pursuit of collecting butterflies to entomology, traveling extensively for her collecting. She died of a stroke at the age of seventy-eight at the side of a road in Trinidad, butterfly net in hand. The Lewis twins, Agnes and Margaret, traveled extensively (not without adventure) in the Middle East and Mediterranean. Knowledgeable in ancient languages and writings, they were recognized as leading scholars in several ancient languages, most notably discovering and working with several early Syriac manuscripts. They were contemporary with Adela, but again, there is no evidence that she met or knew them. Gertrude Bell had traveled so extensively in the Middle East and was so astute about its political situations that the British government depended heavily on her expertise, both during and after the First World War. She also was interested in archaeology and for a time worked with the archaeologist Sir William Ramsay, but archaeology was not her main focus. She was younger than Adela and again there is no information about any contact between them. Other travelers had a typical tourist interest in antiquities and archaeology. Some read widely and observed carefully, but their involvement did not go beyond traveling and observing. Only the Lewis twins pursued the caliber of study and work that included them in the ranks of scholarship and professionalism that Adela was to attain.1 Several women traveled to Mexico at the turn of the century and wrote accounts of their visit, most of which are not very insightful and emphasize the exotic nature of the country— that was, after all, what would sell such a book. Mrs. Ethel Brilliana Tweedie, whose proper upbringing included a surprising number of trips to unusual places, was one of the best of that genre. Her observations and enthusiastic style make her books more readable than many of that genre.2 (Adela once remarked that travel books by women are “dreadful rubbish” [AB to Ella, Mar. 10, 1917, APS].) But Mexico was off the...

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