ABSTRACT
This chapter explores with a description of the contemporary professional and cultural background in which Boyd worked. Boyd's ways of "thinking geography" involved splintering herself into multiple pursuits that related to the discipline itself: expedition leader and photographer and unofficial surveyor and botanist. Boyd is included occasionally in biographical collections of female explorers, but most of these are encyclopedic overviews of women explorers and include a broad range of traveling women with few details. The chapter discusses Boyd's life and work, namely the two polar travel books The Fiord Region of East Greenland and The Coast of Northeast Greenland, which have been generally disregarded following her death. These books contain scientific data - maps, graphs and tables related to the expeditions scientific goals - suggesting why Boyd's writing has been overlooked by travel writing critics. Both books include examples of the thousands of photographs that Boyd took on her expeditions, further enhancing their scientific purpose rather than their narrative quality.
