When I first thought of collecting together ideas and stories about women on the road, I was drawn to the theme by my admiration for the great women travellers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — a love that took me endlessly to second-hand bookshops in search of the memoirs of middle-aged ladies in tweeds and galoshes, who had nursed their parents, or housekept for their brothers, and then emerged from their chrysalis of the put-upon spinster into exotic moths and butterflies.