This document discusses travel writing and gender. It explores how some early women travel writers like Isabella Bird used travel to redefine themselves and escape the constraints of contemporary society by taking on new personas on their journeys. Many travel writers, both male and female, fictionalized their experiences to some degree by writing themselves as characters into their travel accounts. In the 20th century, women's travel writing increasingly focused on the relationship between the individual traveler and the societies they encountered, as well as issues like ecology and global poverty. Jan Morris's travel writing most seriously challenged assumptions about gender by transitioning during her career.