Agnes Herbert begins her first book, Two Dianas in Somaliland: The Record of a Shooting Trip (1907), with the explanation: "It is not that I imagine the world is panting for another tale about a shoot. Simply--I want to write." Write she did--more than one thousand pages in three books of sporting adventures in Somalia, Alaska, and the Caucasus. Accompanied by her cousin Cecily, native guides, and occasionally by her cousin Ralph Windus and another man known only as "the leader of the opposition," Herbert collected an awesome assortment of big-game trophies and travel tales.

Agnes Elsie Diana Thorpe was born around 1880, the daughter of James Bateman Thorpe, and spent her youth on the Isle of Man. The name Herbert was that of her first husband, who died prior to her hunting expeditions, and she continued to use it professionally, even after marrying Comdr. Archibald Thomas Stewart in 1913. She...