Maria Soltera — Spanish for "Mary, unmarried" — was the pen name of Mary Lester, a nineteenth-century Englishwoman remembered for a single vivid work of travel writing, A Lady's Ride Across Spanish Honduras (1884). The book recounts a journey she made in 1881 when, after hearing of a schoolteaching post in San Pedro Sula, she set out from England, crossed the Atlantic and then the United States by train, and sailed from San Francisco to the Pacific port of Amapala in Honduras. From there she rode on horseback and muleback across the country's mountainous interior toward the Atlantic coast, accompanied by a native guide and a mule handler. Fluent in Spanish and evidently unfazed by the rigours of the terrain, she wrote with a keen and often wry eye for landscape, local custom, and the logistics of travel in a region rarely visited by European women of her era. Little biographical detail survives about Lester beyond what can be inferred from the narrative itself. She chose to publish under the Soltera pseudonym, and the book remains her only known publication. It has since been reissued in modern editions, including one with an introduction by the archaeologist Doris Stone, and survives as a primary-source account of nineteenth-century Central America.
1 works on Textopian