Top 10 women travellers in fiction

Jennie Rooney's first novel, Inside the Whale, was shortlisted for the Costa first novel award in 2008. Her new novel, The Opposite of Falling, in which Ursula Bridgewater takes Thomas Cook's famous new tour of America after her engagement is broken off, is out now in the U.K.

For the Guardian, she named a top ten list of fiction's most engaging female adventurers. One entry on her list:

Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

Fearing that marriage will stifle her independence, young American Isabel Archer takes up the offer of a trip to Europe with (of course) her aunt. While in Europe she inherits a fortune, bequeathed to her for the purpose of securing her freedom, but which causes her to become the object of scheming bounty-hunters. Dark and goose-bumpingly sinister.

Read another women traveller on the list.

The Portrait of a Lady is among Elizabeth Edwards' six best books and Tina Brown's five best books on reputation.

--Marshal Zeringue