The Adventures of Miss Ross: Interventions into, and the tenacity of, romance narrative in South West Persia

This article concerns the written life of Dr Elizabeth Ness Macbean Ross (1878– 1915). Ross’s posthumously published memoir about this time, A Lady Doctor in Bakhtiari Land (1921), challenges the masculine, monomythic stance of her travel-writing forebears Sir Henry Layard and Sir Richard Burton and anticipates contemporary texts in which the encounter between “traveling” self and “native” other destabilizes, rather than reaffirms, the traveler’s sense of identity and authority. The article also briefly examines a set of stories the Times ran on Dr Ross, which attempted to appropriate her for a dominant narrative of the Middle East reliant on a languid orientalism, on the one hand, and tales of derring-do, on the other; a narrative which persists to the present day, and which the forgotten A Lady Doctor in Bakhtiari Land works hard to resist.