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Writer, traveller and broadcaster Sara Wheeler follows the trail of six middle-aged women who travelled from Britain to make their names in America in the early nineteenth century. They are Fanny Trollope, mother of Anthony and author of the cutting Domestic Manners of the Americans; actress Fanny Kemble, who made a passionate indictment of slavery; pamphleteering economist Harriet Martineau; homesteader Rebecca Burlend; traveller Isabella Bird; and Jane Austen’s niece, novelist Catherine Hubback, who left her husband in a madhouse and travelled to San Francisco. All of them were outsiders whose true qualities came to the fore in the emerging new world.

Wheeler studied classics and modern languages at Oxford before embarking on polar explorations. She is author of seven books including The Magnetic North and Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica.