Rachel Lilian Leland[5] was born in New York on 16 October 1857, the daughter of Mary and Theron Leland.[4] Theron Leland was a writer, lecturer, and freethinker, who was secretary of the Liberal League.[4] He was also one of the first phonographic reporters in America.[4][5] Mary A. Leland was among the first American women to study medicine, becoming a lecturer in anatomy as early as 1852.[4]
Lilian Leland was first taught by her father, and then attended school in New York.[4] Her desire to travel came from reading The Merchant of Venice and a book about the Indian Archipelago, entitled The Prison of Weltevreden.[4]
At the age of 25, Leland embarked upon a solo journey of nearly sixty thousand miles, which lasted for nearly two years.[4][6] The only other woman recorded to have taken a comparable journey alone at that time was Ida Pfeiffer.[4] Leland subsequently published Travelling Alone: A Woman's Journey Round the World (1890) compiled from letters she wrote on the way.[4][7]
Leland married H. L. Andrews, the son of Stephen Pearl Andrews, abolitionist and freethinker.[8]
Samuel Porter Putnam described her as "Always pleasant and cheerful in appearance, and never, under any circumstances, uttering a complaint, she is, at the same time, possessed of a quiet determination that carries her smilingly and safely over all difficulties."[4]
Leland died in Queens, New York on 4 April 1934 from pneumonia.[2]
