Near the top of my list of classic one-liners from literature is Jane Eyre’s quiet, triumphant aside: “Reader, I married him.” Jill Yadav, who died of cancer in England this Thursday, might have made that her motto.

Yadav was 52 when she came to India to try and put a bad marriage and a dead-end working life behind her, however briefly. She found more than temporary relief. Her travels around India had an unusual ending; she married her taxi driver, adapted with undaunted optimism to their visits to his village, and wrote about it in Yadav: A Roadside Love Story.

The book, part travelogue and part personal history, had little to recommend it in literary terms beyond the author’s patent honesty and optimism. Her insights into India were not especially original, and she didn’t have the kind of talent that could lift the telling of her love story beyond the mundane.

But what Jill did have was an unquenchable spirit. At an age when many women are under pressure to be sedate, to give up on life’s surprises, to conform, she had the courage to embark on new, transforming journeys.

Those are the qualities that spoke to readers in India and elsewhere, and that made people receive Yadav with affection, even delight. We are encouraged to discard our belief in romance at a fairly early age: Jill believed in romance with a capital R, both in terms of her love life and in terms of the romance of travel.

When I think of Jill, I think of the generations of women travellers before her who embarked on journeys equally, sometimes more, challenging with a similar openness of spirit. From the redoubtable Lady Hester Stanhope to Isabella Burton to Dervla Murphy and Rebecca West, they travelled for varied reasons: because they needed, like Jill, to escape the straitjacket of their lives, because something larger than themselves called and they had to answer.

Set against the difficulties that some of these women faced, it might seem easy to see Jill’s journey from England to India as a minor footnote. Eliza Bradley survived shipwreck; Freya Stark overcame heart trouble in Arabia; Lady Sale survived the Afghan campaign; Susan Rijnhart saw her infant son die during an expedition in Tibet.

But Jill shared a kinship with these women. She had the courage to go away from the familiar into the alien. She had a zest for life in her 50s and 60s that women in their 20s and 30s might envy. She had the true spirit of the adventurer — the willingness to accept everything that comes your way. And when she was offered love, she broke barriers of background, class and race, certain that she was right.

There are two ways of seeing travel: one is as an exploration of “virgin” territory, a procession of conquests and discoveries. The other is the way Pico Iyer described memorably: “Travel remains a journey into whatever we can’t explain, or explain away.” Jill may not have boldly gone where no man had gone before. But she made the really important journey, and she invited us along on the trip. You couldn’t ask for a better epitaph.