[1][2][3] Alongside fellow Englishwoman Fanny Jane Butler, she founded the John Bishop Memorial Hospital in Srinagar in modern-day Kashmir.

[5] Bird was born on 15 October 1831 in Boroughbridge Hall, Yorkshire, the home of her maternal grandmother and her father's first curacy after taking orders in 1821.

When six years old, she confronted the local MP for South Cheshire, Sir Malpas de Grey Tatton Egerton, while he was campaigning, asking him "did you tell my father my sister was so pretty because you wanted his vote?

"[10] Edward Bird's controversial views against Sunday labour caused his congregation to dwindle, and in 1842 he requested a transfer to St. Thomas's in Birmingham.

Her only education came from her parents: her father was a keen botanist who instructed Bird in flora, and her mother taught her daughters an eclectic mix of subjects.

[10] However, her "bright intelligence, [and] an extreme curiosity as to the world outside, made it impossible for her brain and her nature generally to be narrowed and stiffened by the strictly evangelical atmosphere of her childhood".

Doctors urged a sea voyage and in 1854, Bird's life of travelling began when the opportunity arose for her to sail to the United States, accompanying her second cousins to their family home.

[10] Bird's "bright descriptive letters"[5] written home to her relations formed the basis for her first book, An Englishwoman in America (1856),[12] published by Murray.

[13] Bird left Britain again in 1872, going initially to Australia, which she disliked, and then to Hawaii (known in Europe as the Sandwich Islands), her love for which prompted her second book (published three years later).

Her letters to her sister, first printed in the magazine The Leisure Hour,[14] comprised Bird's fourth and perhaps most famous book, A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains.

[1] Bird's health took a severe turn for the worse but, other than a spell of scarlet fever in 1888, it recovered following John Bishop's death in 1886, at which point she inherited a large amount of disposable income.

She remained with the unit's commanding officer during his survey work in the region, armed with her revolver and a medicine chest supplied – in possibly an early example of corporate sponsorship – by Henry Wellcome's company in London.

[citation needed] In 1891, she travelled through Baluchistan to Iran and Armenia, exploring the source of the Karun River and later that year, she gave a speech in a committee room of the House of Commons on the persecution of Christians in Kurdistan, on which she had made representations to the Grand Vizier of the Turkish Empire.

[14] A few months after returning from a trip to Morocco, Bird fell ill and died at her home on 16 Melville Street,[17] Edinburgh on 7 October 1904.