Jose Dew has a whole series of books of her tours.

If you look up the history of the Paris-Brest-Paris (PBP), you'll see it talks about women in cycling. Back in the late 1800s people figured that if anyone did a 1200 km ride in such a short time he would drop dead ... but they figured that a woman would drop dead on a shorter ride than that. So they didn't allow women to ride the PBP at first, despite the fact that quite a few signed up.