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Ida Pfeiffer
Including the Biography
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Nevertheless, she kept to her resolution, but concealed the real goal of her journey, declaring that her intention was to visit a friend at Constantinople, with whom she had for a long time kept up an active correspondence. She kept her passport concealed, and no one of those from whom she parted had any idea of her destination. Very painful was the parting from her sons, to whom she was tenderly attached; but she fought bravely against her softer emotions, consoled her friends with the prospect of soon meeting them again, and on the 22d of March, 1842, embarked on the steamer that was to convey her down the Danube to the Black Sea and the City of the Crescent. She visited Brussa, Beyrout, Jaffa, Jerusalem, the Dead Sea, Nazareth, Damascus, Baalbek, the Lebanon, Alexandria, and Cairo, and traveled across the Desert to the Isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea. From Egypt she returned by way of Sicily and the whole of Italy to her home, arriving in Vienna in December, 1842.
As she had carefully kept a diary of her journey, from which she frequently read extracts to friends and acquaintances, she was often requested to print her experiences. The thought of becoming an authoress was repugnant to her modesty, and it was only when a publisher made her a direct offer that she consented to trust her first book to the press. It bore the title, “Journey of a Viennese Lady to the Holy Land.” The first edition appeared in two volumes in 1843, the fourth in 1856; and though the authoress neither had much that was new to tell, nor rode her Pegasus in the approved style of the traveled ladies of the period, her little book was still successful, as the four editions sufficiently prove. The very simplicity of the narration, and its appearance of unvarnished truth, at once gained numerous readers for the book.
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