In this paper I will use case studies drawn from my ongoing PhD research, into women’s involvement with Royal Geographical Society (RGS)-supported expeditions between 1913 and 1970, to explore the popular reception of their expeditionary work. Whilst women’s past expeditionary work, in common with women’s past geographical work more broadly, has until recently been comparatively overlooked within the history of geographical thought and practice, and within understandings of expeditions as epistemological spaces and practices (Maddrell 2009; Rose 1993), at the time of their expeditions many of these women were well-known public figures, achieving popular fame and recognition on the basis of their published popular accounts of their expeditionary work, and the lectures that they gave to institutions such as the RGS, semi-public spaces. Some of these works continue to attract popular audiences today, as do biographies of the women in question. This trend was a continuation of the tremendous public appetite for accounts by women travellers associated with the careers of earlier women travellers such as Isabella Bird and Mary Kingsley (Birkett 1989, Blunt 1994). In this paper I will discuss the tropes and discourses employed by women such as Freya Stark, Rosita Forbes and Evelyn Cheesman in their accounts of their expeditionary work, and the popular and scholarly receptions of these accounts, in case studies drawn from the earlier part of my research period.