Isabella Bird was a woman of remarkable gifts. In 1872, at the age of forty, this rather earnest daughter of a country parson abandoned the rectory nest and began her pioneering journeys to some of the most inhospitable corners of the world. Undismayed by discomfort or danger she was to spend almost thirty years travelling - to the Rocky Mountains, the Sandwich Isles, to Japan, Malaya, Kashmir and Tibet, to Persia, Korea and China - where an indomitable spirit, an unassuming cordiality and, above all, a limitless capacity for being interested won her universal welcome. Her accounts of her experiences became best-selling books and established for Isabella Bird a reputation as one of the great travel writers of her day. 'Miss Barr has her measure. She and Miss Bird are well suited. The style of both is fresh, energetic, visual, making an enchanting book.' Evening Standard 'Rich and riotous as her intrepid heroine moves at the speed of a silent movie through landscapes lusher than any technicolour.' Times Literary Supplement 'A rare book.' Sunday Telegraph

It was the Emperor Meiji's restoration to the throne in 1868 that ushered in the long period of 'Enlightened Government' which saw thousands of Westerners crossing Japan's threshold to witness the country's modernisation.

For thirty years professionals, diplomats, traders, missionaries and globe-trotters introduced new possibilities to a nation that had long been isolated. Each visitor and resident experienced a different Japan during these exciting and progressive years: from the machinations of the merchants in the Yokohama "hongs "and the bear-worshipping rituals of the Ainu to the secret and cruel world of the courtesans of the Nightless City, to missionaries disappearing into the hinterland with bibles and bicycles and upper-class Japanese women dancing Viennese waltzes under the chandeliers of the Deer Cry Pavalion.

In "The Coming of the Barbarians, "also pubilshed by Faber Finds, Pat Barr wrote of the early years of Japan's contact with the West, painting the portrait of a society in transition: in "The Deer Cry Pavilion" the pace is accelerated as she describes a country hurtling through centuries of change in just a few decades.

Nineteenth-century Japan was pristine, inviolate and feudal, ruled by the legendary Shogun and the sacred puppet-Emperor, the Mikado. Foreigners were despised and feared as 'hairy barbarians'; for more than two hundred years Dutch merchants had been the only settlers, interned on the tiny island of Decima. The advent of a US naval force in 1853 heralded a new era of drama and upheaval as foreign consuls, merchants and travellers established a risky presence on Japan's shores, opening up a new frontier for both East and West. Pat Barr's sparkling and vivid narrative spans these twenty years and captures the excitement and wonder, beauty and adventure of Japan at its moment of entry into the modern world. Pat Barr continues the story of Japan in an age of transition in The Deer Cry Pavilion, also reissued by Faber Finds.

Thousands of British women lived in India during Victorian times. They first went out as wives, mothers, sisters; others followed as teachers, doctors, missionaries. What they did and how they responded to their strange environment were seldom thought worthy of record, and writers have handed down to us a fictional image of the typical 'memsahib' as a frivolous, snobbish and selfish creature flitting from bridge to tennis parties 'in the hills'. For the most part, these cliches bear little resemblance to the truth; many women loyally and stoically accepted their share of the responsibility with endurance, courage and resilience.

This story is developed around a number of women who wrote in an entertaining and intelligent fashion about their Indian experiences, starting with the arrival on the scene of one of the wittiest and cleverest of them all - Emily Eden, sister of Lord Auckland who was Governor-General from 1836 to 1842. It ends with Maud Diver, who maintained that the random assertion made by Kipling about the 'lower tone of social morality' in India was unjust and untrue. The "dramatis personae" of the book include Vicereines, wives of Civil Servants and missionaries struggling to break down the subservience of women throughout the vast sub-continent. Through women's eyes we witness the principal historic events at the time - the Afghan conflicts, the Mutiny - as well as the daily routines in very different cantonments and some of the British personalities who made their mark on nineteenth-century India - Honoria Lawrence, Flora Steel, Lady Sale. In this vivid account, Pat Barr evokes the sights and smells of Victorian India, its teeming masses, its problems so impossible, it seemed, for Englishwomen to solve.