The essence of adventure lies in taking risks and exploring the unknown, so it is hardly surprising to find that early travel accounts tended for the most part to be written by men, who moved more freely in the public sphere. The great European sagas of knightly questing (such as The Norse Sagas and The Arthurian Cycle) or seafaring exploration (such as The Odyssey and The Lusiads) are also male narratives with women the objects of desire or destination points rather than active co-travellers, though the figure of the warrior-princess roaming the world in search of adventure was popular in Renaissance epics like Orlando furioso and Gerusalemme liberata. The adventure quest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when men journeyed in search of fortune and renown to the new worlds that were opening up beyond the frontiers of Europe, was explicitly gendered, since the idea of man as heroic risk-taking traveller underpinned not only the great travel narratives of the next centuries, but much of the travel writing of the twentieth century also.

Alongside the myths of the heroic explorer, however, are other kinds of narrative, some of which have been produced by women. The travel text as ethnography or social commentary transcends gender boundaries and, increasingly in the twentieth century, male and female travellers have written self-reflexive texts that defy easy categorisation as autobiography, memoir, or travel account. There is also, in British travel writing, a tendency to self-deprecation and irony, a style of writing that has both Henry Fielding and Jane Austen as its antecedents, despite the fact that the latter did not move beyond the confines of southern England. Contemporary writers like Redmond O’Hanlon and Eric Newby subvert or satirise the image of the explorer-hero, turning themselves into anti-heroes in their narratives, a comic reversal of the dominant image of the male traveller who seeks to boldly go where no man has gone before.