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The Great Steppe stretches from the Volga River and the Caspian Sea in the west to the easternmost limits of Djungaria in Western China. Sometimes referred to as the biggest field in the world, this vast region is as mysterious today as it was a thousand years ago. Despite modern development it remains little visited and little known. This was once a land of nomads, barren and harsh at its centre, but with rich grasslands fed by the many rivers flowing from the surrounding mountains. It was home to a society that kept no records other than the epic poems and songs celebrating the stories of its great batyrs (warriors). Whatever is known of this society survives within local culture - desecrated as it is by years of Soviet cultural vandalism - or in the voices of outsiders who occasionally passed through. Usually they were on their way elsewhere - to India, China, Tibet - but occasionally there were visitors who took more than a passing interest in the lives of the steppe nomads. Their findings and impressions are collected in this book. Edited and told with relish by Nick Fielding, these are the stories of early papal emissaries like Friar William of Rubruck and Jean de Piano Carpini, sent to negotiate with the Mongols, and the merchant adventurers like Andrew Jenkinson and Jonas Hanway who tried to capture the Silk Road trade. Later came the early scientists and geographers associated with Peter Simon Pallas and the Russian explorers exemplified by Chokan Walikhanov and Petr Petrovich Semenov. Thomas and Lucy Atkinson became the earliest British visitors to spend time in the steppe. They were followed by military adventurers such as Captain Fred Burnaby and James Abbott, and journalists including the great Aloysius MacGahan and David Ker, the original purveyor of 'fake news'. Besides Lucy Atkinson there were other determined women travellers including Adéle Hommaire de Hell and the remarkable Marie de Ujfalvy-Bourdon, both of whom documented life in the Great Steppe. Cambridge scientist William Bateson spent 18 months traversing the steppes looking for snail shells in the 1880s, and by the end of the 19th century the first tourists - some, like R L Jefferson, on bicycle - were arriving, to be followed by mining engineers and agricultural merchants. All have a tale to tell.

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Recollections of Tartar Steppes, first published in 1863, is a lost classic of women's travel writing that remains one of the earliest and best examples of the genre. In February 1848 the erstwhile English governess Lucy Atkinson set off from Moscow with her new husband Thomas Witlam Atkinson on a journey that would eventually last almost six years and cover more than 40,000 miles through the unknown wastes of Siberia and Central Asia. To add to the challenge, Lucy found soon after setting off out that she was pregnant. Having barely ever ridden in her life, she spent her entire pregnancy on horseback, before giving birth to a son in a yurt in a remote corner of Central Asia. Remarkably, her child survived and for the next five years accompanied his parents wherever they travelled - through the Djungar Alatau Mountains on the borders with China, the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia and then thousands of miles east to Irkutsk, Lake Baikal and the Sayan Mountains. Lucy Atkinson was not simply a passive witness on this remarkable journey, but an active participant, handling horses and camels, organizing Cossack and local guides and learning to shoot for the pot. On several occasions she levelled a rifle to protect her husband when he was threatened by brigands. Throughout this book, based on diaries she kept, she brings to life her remarkable experiences, whether sharing a meal with a Kazakh chieftain, negotiating the hire of reindeer to carry her baby son, or setting off for two weeks in an open rowing boat onto the unpredictable waters of Lake Baikal. During the bitter winters, when the Atkinsons hunkered down in one of the scattered towns of Siberia to avoid the worst of the sub-zero temperatures, she was a sensation at the soirées and parties that punctuated the long, dark evenings. Through her connections to her former employer in St Petersburg she also met with many of the exiled Decembrists and their wives, including Princess Maria Volkonsky and Princess Katherine Troubetskoy. Out of print for many years, this new edition includes a detailed introduction by Nick Fielding and Marianne Simpson - a direct descendant of Lucy Atkinson's brother Matthew - which explains the background to Lucy's travels and the fascinating events that followed her return to London and her husband's death in 1861.

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