Amelia Anne Blandford Edwards was an accomplished woman of letters when she decided to turn her summer expeditions of mountain climbing in the Dolomites and sailing up the Nile into popular travel books. Like other Victorian adventuresses she was middle-class, middle-aged, and unmarried. In her writing she combined the expertise of a geologist, archaeologist, and art critic with the style of a witty storyteller. The stories told in both Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys (1873) and A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1877) reveal the independence of an early feminist and the contradictory manners and assumptions of British travelers in the age of empire. A self-made woman in several genres, Edwards eventually applied her literary talents to popular accounts of the expeditions and discoveries of British Egyptologists. Travel writing for Edwards bridged the gap between literature and science and initiated her career as a public intellectual with wide-ranging concerns and...