SOURCE: "The Emma of the Desert," in A Small Part of Time: Essays on Literature, Art and Travel, 1957. Reprint by Dufour Editions, 1961, pp. 129-37.

In the following essay, Swan discusses a volume of published letters Bell wrote to her father and stepmother from abroad.

There is evidently some special quality in the British national character which has produced so long a succession of indomitable women travellers; it is almost impossible to imagine a Lady Mary Wortley Montagu from France recounting her lively stories of adventure in the harems of Stamboul, or a Lady Hester Stanhope from Italy dominating the caravanserais of the Syrian desert. The Latin mind must find lives so adventurous as theirs alarmingly unfeminine; the Moorish invasion of Spain and those Saracenic raids on the littorals of Italy left behind them the indelible mark of female sequestration.

All the same, it seems to have been the...