Isabel Burton's achievement and reputation as a travel writer rest upon five published works. The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton (1897), an autobiographical work, provides a calendar of her life and travels. It frames her narrative of the The Life of Captain Sir Richd. F. Burton (1893), which recounts the life, explorations, and writings of her famous husband and also supplies the context for her own travelogues--The Inner Life of Syria, Palestine, and the Holy Land (1875), Arabia, Egypt, India (1879), and The Passion Play at Ober-Ammergau (1900).

Burton reveals little about her early years. In The Romance we learn that she was born in London to Eliza Gerard, sister of the First Baron Robert Gerard, and Henry Raymond Arundell, of the old and proud Roman Catholic Arundell family of Wardour. She remained a Catholic, and her religion is a subtext in her writing. As the eldest of the eleven children of...