Katarina Gephardt 28 Dervla Murphy, Selected Works (1965–2015) Abstract: Dervla Murphy is a prolific Irish travel writer who established her reputa- tion with Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle (1965) and has published over twenty-four travel books in the course of her career. She avoids car travel and motor roads, preferring to travel on a bicycle or with a pack animal. Several of her books describe travel with her young daughter. She typically chooses destinations off the beaten track or ones affected by a major political change or conflict. Further distin- guishing characteristics of the writer’s oeuvre include subversion of gender norms, focus on nature and landscape aesthetics, nostalgia for preindustrial societies, and critique of Western civilization. Murphy’s travel writing is documentary rather than self-consciously literary and has not received adequate attention from academic crit- ics, even though her books have been consistently popular and republished. Key Terms: Cosmopolitanism, cycling, Irishness, gender, landscape 1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment For her tenth birthday, Dervla Murphy received a second-hand bicycle and an atlas. As she pedalled up a hill in her native Lismore, Ireland, marvelling at the strength of her limbs, she arrived at a startling realization: “If I went on doing this for long enough I could get to India” (Murphy 1965, 96). She did not share the plan with adults for fear that they would dismiss it “as an amusing childish whim” (Murphy 1965, 96). It took another twenty years to fulfil this childhood dream, and even then, most people regarded Murphy “as a lunatic or an embryonic heroine,” in ei- ther case an eccentric (Murphy 1965, 230). Undaunted, Murphy set out on the jour- ney to India, continued to travel extensively, and published over twenty-four travel books in the span of a career lasting over fifty years. Now an octogenarian, Murphy still resides in her native village, and her Irish roots shaped her perspectives on travel. Her parents came from families at the oppo- site ends of the political spectrum, with her father being “a son of a rabidly Republican family” and her mother “the daughter of a mildly Unionist family” (Murphy 1965, 34). However, Murphy claims that the family prejudices left her unaf- fected and “unquestioningly accepting their covert mutual hostility as a fact of Irish life” (Murphy 1965, 35). She translates this early experience of sectarianism into a ten- dency to examine other cultures from different angles, empathize with divergent per- spectives, and approach cultural relativity with characteristic humor. She started her https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110498974-029