Ida Laura Pfeiffer was born Ida Reyer in Vienna in 1797, one of seven children of a wealthy textile manufacturer who dressed her in boys’ clothes and encouraged sports. At five she traveled with her family to Egypt and Palestine. After her father died when she was nine, her mother put her back in dresses and piano lessons. In 1809 she turned her back on Napoleon’s generals at a review at Schönbrunn Palace, and she read Robinson Crusoe and Alexander von Humboldt. In 1820, at 22, she married Mark Anton Pfeiffer, a 46-year-old lawyer, and moved to Lemberg. After he exposed official corruption and was blacklisted, she supported their sons Alfred and Oscar with music and drawing lessons until an 1831 inheritance took her back to Vienna.
In 1842, at 45 with her sons grown, she traveled to Istanbul, Jerusalem, and Egypt, and her anonymous 1844 book earned 700 florins. She learned Danish, English, daguerreotype photography, and specimen preservation, then visited Iceland and climbed Hekla. Her first trip around the world, from 1846 to 1848, took her into the Brazilian rainforest with one servant, to Tahiti, China, India by bullock cart, and the ruins of Babylon and Nineveh. Her specimens won a 1,500 guilder government grant. A second circuit from 1851 to 1855 covered South Africa, Indonesia, and Gold Rush California. In 1857 she was caught up in a plot against Queen Ranavalona I of Madagascar, contracted a fever during her expulsion, and died in Vienna in 1858.
- Alexander von Humboldt championed her work, and she became the first woman made an honorary member of the Geographical Society of Berlin.
- The Royal Geographical Society in London refused to admit her.
- A spider, a freshwater prawn, and a Madagascan frog are named in her honor.
- Charles Darwin quoted her observations of beauty standards in Java in The Descent of Man, and Thoreau cited her in Walden.
- In 1892 her remains were moved to an honored section of the Vienna Central Cemetery, the first woman admitted there.
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