Mitton, Geraldine Edith A Bachelor Girl in Burma. London Adam & Charles Black 1907
First edition, 8vo (21 x 16 cm), pp.xiii, [1, blank], 275, [1], 95 plates, folding map. A very good copy in slightly rubbed original pictorial cloth, spine lightly bumped. Contemporary unrelated presentation inscription.
Herbert 74

Geraldine Edith Mitton (1868-1955), an English writer, visited Burma around 1905 and married Sir James George Scott (Shway Yoe) in 1920, collaborating with him on several novels set in Burma. She later wrote the account of his life Scott of the Shan Hills (1936). She provides an amusing impressionistic account of her first two months in Burma, where, starting from Moulmein, she travelled to Mandalay and Bhamo. She readily admits this is not a book "on Burma" but a recounting of her experiences and observation, refraining "from generalising on the basis of one example". She observes that as a 'holiday-land Burma is only just beginning to be known' but that this would soon change as the journey is 'extraordinarily cheap'. The illustrations are mostly from her own Kodak, supplemented by those from her friends, and are interesting in not just the quantity but that they depict the mundane, families and village life, as much as the extraordinary temples and landscape.