Lady Margaret Alice Lilly (de Windt) Brooke, Ranee of Sarawak, was part of a social set that included many other famous Victorians, from writers and painters to politicians and biologists. Brooke's renown, apart from her apparently vivid intelligence and charm, rested on the unusual circumstances of her life, which the popularity of her two books about her travels made well known in England. Apart from Impromptus (1923), a little-known collection of short stories set in England, she wrote only the two travel narratives, one twenty-one years after the other. These books, the first completely and the second partly, are memoirs of what Brooke regarded as the most exciting time of her life--her years as the ranee, or queen, in the southeast Asian state of Sarawak, a small area that is now a state in Malaysia, on the western coast of the island of Borneo. Brooke's travel memoirs constitute a...