D¿nlaith Bird argues that vagabondage - a physical and textual elaboration of gender identity in motion - emerges as a totemic concept in European women's travel writing from 1850. For Olympe Audouard, Isabella Bird, Isabelle Eberhardt, and Freya Stark vagabondage is a means of extending the parameters by which 'women' are defined.

• 1: Introduction: Travelling in Different Skins


• 2: Walk Like a Man: Vagabondage and Gender Construction


• 3: Performance in Motion: Gender Identity, Performativity and Travel Writing


• 4: The Inky Body: Writing Corporeality


• 5: Bearded Queens and Amazons: Cross-dressing, Disguise and Deception


• 6: Selling the Skirt: Women's Travel Writing and the Literary Market


• 7: Skirting the Issue: Intelligibility and Recognition


• 8: A Woman's Place: Spatial Dynamics of the Orient


• Conclusion: Casting Skins


• Appendix


• Bibliography: Bound in Different Skins

Dr Dúnlaith Bird is Maître de langue at the École normale supérieure, Paris, where she teaches courses on Irish culture, history, and literature, travel writing, post-colonial and gender studies, and translation. She studied English and French at St. Catherine's College, Oxford University, and was awarded her doctorate by Oxford University in 2009. She has published articles on Isabelle Eberhardt and cross-dressing, women's travel writing and commerciality, and Samuel Beckett and textual interstices. In 2010 she organised the Beckett Between International Conference at the École normale supérieure, and has acted as Guest Editor for Samuel Beckett Today: Aujourd'hui. She is the 2008 winner of the Wallace Watson Award, and has twice retraced the route of Isabella Bird's Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880), filming a documentary on the topic with NHK in Japan in August 2011.