Darwin's female friends, relations, and correspondents didn't tend to mount scientific expeditions of the sort that led men to write to Darwin for advice; nevertheless, in the quest for health, accompanying husbands to foreign postings, or decamping with their families to new homes abroad, they did travel, and sent back their impressions.

The female traveller who was closest to home was Henrietta. After suffering a great deal of illness in her youth, Henrietta recovered enough to take several trips to Europe. Emma worried, ‘I only hope you may not turn into a regular travelling old maid living abroad’ (DAR 219.9 73). She wrote long letters home (‘I find it decidedly trying to read yr descriptions’, wrote her forthright friend, Elinor Bonham Carter). She always travelled in company with a friend or a relation, staying at guest-houses patronised by other English people, and at a pinch a brother or servant could be dispatched to Paris or Calais to bring her home if the party broke up leaving her unchaparoned. Nevertheless, by 1870 she declared to Emma, ‘an idiot cd travel alone in France’ (DAR 245: 40). In 1866, she was travelling in France with Elinor, who had been unwell and wanted to go abroad. In this letter of 4 June, she describes a train wreck near Arles to Emma.