The Intersecting Identities of Lady Isabel Burton: Woman, Wife, Explorer
by Mara Willsdon, History Research Volunteer
In word and deed, Lady Isabel Burton’s existence at the intersection of “lady traveller” and devoted wife straddled the line between social acceptability and impropriety. As a prolific writer and accomplished traveller, Isabel, for all intents and purposes, fit the description of the Victorian Explorer but for one thing: her womanhood. By utilising the vignette of the “Angel in the House” as a foregrounding aspect of her public persona, Isabel succeeded in employing Victorian conventions of duty and devotion to follow Richard as a “constant companion” in his travels. This is epitomised in the observation by Isabel in her autobiography, “if I were [a man], I would be Richard Burton. But as I am a woman, I would be Richard Burton’s wife.”
Dominant Victorian social attitudes made the roles of woman and wife inseparable, taking as fact the stereotype that women were naturally weak, mentally inferior, servile caregivers. Women’s lesser standing was attributed to their “natural state”, rather than the lack of financial, professional, and educational resources available to them. Women at work, it was argued, were simply less effective than men. Education was often considered an “unwomanly affair”. “Women’s work” was commonly relegated to the private sphere of the home and family, often domestic labour and secretarial work, with contributions going unrecognised and uncompensated.
Isabel’s status as a member of the upper-class meant that she was not expected to undertake more menial household tasks, as women of the lower- or middle-classes were required to. However, like many of her contemporaries, much of Isabel’s work was conducted privately: as Richard’s editor, fact-checker, and financial “agent”. She was careful not to overstep him and focused on advancing him socially and professionally while she “studiously avoided” promoting herself. Such was the role of the ideal Victorian wife. When Isabel’s work did enter the public sphere, her books The inner life of Syria, Palestine, and the Holy Land (1875) and Arabia, Egypt, India (1879) were deemphasised as works of academic note. Only recently have they been reinterpreted as exploration narratives.
By advertising them as informal pieces from her diaries which might interest women, she presented her audience as one which posed no threat to Richard’s more academic exploration narratives. Nonetheless, her works could be interpreted as semi-anthropological for their observations of various women and the environments they inhabited: painting rich portraits of her friend Hagar Burton, the fisherwomen in Boulogne, and the women of Damascus. Classed as entertaining and interesting, reviewers also described them as “gossipy”, a notably gendered denomination. Where it is likely that the academic disregard of Isabel’s works is because of sexism, both towards her and her subjects, it is also entirely possible that this was by design; that Isabel’s aversity to overstepping Richard extended not only to the volume of her work, but to the content and marketing of it.
Isabel leaned into Victorian convictions of stereotypical femininity to emphasise the acceptability of her match with Richard, thus transforming her desire for travel into wifely devotion. As his “companion”, it was accepted—even expected—that Isabel might dedicate her life to travelling alongside him. Propriety could not accept that this was because of any great desire of her own. But Isabel did desire, and always had, to travel. Only through Richard’s appetite was her own made appropriate.
Much of her autobiography positions her as the untypical but obligingly conformist “Angel in the House”: professing her occasional ascension beyond the social bounds of womanhood; but never beyond her role as a wife or a Catholic. Taken from the 1854 Coventry Patmore poem of the same name, the descriptive moniker came to represent the ideal woman: ultra-feminine, biddable, demure, deferent, Christian; and fictitious. Her world revolved around her husband and family. The “Angel in the House” was a male fantasy, a depiction which heavily played into existing conceptions of femininity and womanhood.
Appearing thematically within Isabel’s works, the “Angel in the House” persona could be regarded as a means by which she avoided critique of her own deep desires. Indeed, where duty could be emphasised, Isabel and her co-biographer Wilkins did so. In The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton (1897), she was the young woman who ran to Hagar Burton for prophecy and mystery, fascinated, like many Victorians, with the unexplainable and supernatural. And yet she was the young woman who consistently returned home to familial duty. She was the obedient but head-strong eldest daughter: sacrificing her education at sixteen to return to her family but waiting to marry a man her family may not approve of. She was the woman who screamed at cockroaches, the wife who stopped when her husband critiqued her, and the companion who set aside her femininity to fulfil the role to its fullest. She married adventure and exploration, and gained the freedom she had always desired, but still did not express her desire beyond the bounds of societal acceptance. In short, Isabel positioned herself at the delicate crossroads of desire and expectation and used the “Angel in the House” to justify it.
While Isabel adopted the role of the “Angel in the House”, Richard inhabited the role of the Explorer thoroughly: hyper-masculine, “European”, representing romance and rebellion, surviving danger, cultivating an interest in academia, and acting as an agent of Empire. Whiteness and manhood were the foremost prerequisites for the capital-E Explorer. The academic scope of the Explorer ranged from anthropology and linguistics to geography and botany and included semi-compulsory authorship. Isabel was certainly interested in the academic scope of exploration, and through her collaboration with Richard was just as instrumental in the evolution of these disciplines during the late-nineteenth century.
[Lady Isabel Burton, Creative Commons]
Moreover, Isabel fulfilled many of the Explorer’s requisites herself. Danger did not discomfit her. When threatened with violence by a young man named Hasan in “Zebedani” (Al-Zabadani, Syria) due to her Christian faith, she jumped from her horse and beat him with her whip. What’s more, by facilitating Richard’s professional ambition through her “ancient and honoured family”, opening the doors to the prospects of the British Empire, Isabel too acted for the Empire. Without her, Richard would not have secured consul positions and expeditions supported by the Civil Service. Given Richard’s inauspicious time in the military in India, it was only when he wed Isabel that powerful people became desirous to be of service to them. Undaunted by “pain, privation, [and] danger”, she sought, through her “ideal” romance with Richard, to experience those hardships with him. Ultimately, it was her femininity that prevented her contemporaries from seeing her as an Explorer, preventing her from being viewed like Richard.
Isabel’s undeniable devotion towards Richard was stressed as a means of making her transgression of socio-geographical boundaries acceptable. Victorian gender and occupation were as much about the performance as it was about personal experience. In her biography, Isabel described her long-desired marriage to Richard as “life”, fulfilling her “ideal of being a companion and a wife, a life of travel, adventure and danger, seeing and learning, with love to glorify it”. Such interwoven associations between marriage and exploration served to justify her desire but centred it so resoundingly upon Richard that it still served to advance him and continued to shroud her exploratory endeavours. Thus, Isabel never overstepped the bounds of womanhood which held her back from being viewed as an Explorer in her own right.
