Traveller, journalist and sportswoman, Maillart travelled extensively in Europe and Russia in the early 1930s. In 1932 she stayed six months in Russian Turkestan living amongst Kirghiz and Kazakh tribesman who she wrote about in Turkestan Solo (1938). In 1934 she went to Manchuria as correspondent of the magazine, Petit Parisien, for which she continued to write during her travels in Iran and Afghanistan in 1937. Forbidden Journey, the account of her travels in the Gobi desert and return journey via the Hindu Kush accompanied by Peter Fleming, was published in 1937. In the early months of 1939, Maillart and her travelling companion Christina traversed Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan, as the latter ‘fought a hopeless battle against her addiction to drugs’ (Russell 1986: xiii). Maillart's narrative of the journey, The Cruel Way, was published after the Second World War. She wrote both in French and English and also represented her native Switzerland at single-handed sailing in the 1924 Paris Olympics and later at ladies hockey and skiing.

From:

The Cruel Way (1947)

According to Mary Morris and Larry O'Connor, Maillart was ‘one of the first writers to consider the inner journey’; her distinctiveness as a travel writer lay in her interweaving of ‘political and historical details with the personal and the everyday’ (Morris 1996: 243).