A prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction, Eileen Bigland is most notable for her books about her travels to places that were undergoing political and social upheaval. Always adventurous, she was, for instance, the first white or Western woman to travel the Burma Road in China, and her choices of destinations corresponded to her political leanings. During the 1930s and later she enthusiastically explored how Communism was reshaping the East, and she also wrote about traveling in central Africa.

Except for the information in Bigland's autobiography, Awakening to Danger (1946), which focuses largely on her travels, little is known about Bigland's personal life. Born in 1898 in Edinburgh, Scotland, to a family that was half Calvinist Scot and half Russian, Eileen Bigland was fascinated early on by her grandmother's Slavic heritage. From her grandmother she learned enough Russian to facilitate her later travels. She had two older sisters, Francesca and...