The Art of Rambling: Journeys through Space and Time with Mary Kingsley, Rose Macaulay, Ursula Le Guin, Naomi Mitchison and Octavia Butler

In “The Art of Rambling: Journeys Through Space and Time”, Sarah LeFanu will look at the travels and travel-writings of, predominantly, Mary Kingsley and Rose Macaulay, and will boldly suggest some connections with the science fictional spacewomen and time-travellers of the second wave of feminism. She will talk about five travelling women whose lives span over one hundred years, and look at some of the connections between them in their lives and in their writing. By focusing on the experience of the five authors in a larger socio-cultural and literary context, LeFanu will trace the implications of writing and travelling vis-à-vis the intersectionality of one’s personal commitments and motivations, with the aim to discovering how these are inflected by questions of gender and gender bias, consequently bearing upon the shape of modern discourses of women travel and travel writing. While each of the women travelled in different modes and to different places, for every one of them the imaginative worlds of their childhoods inspired them to engage with the world outside, an engagement that was not just personal but was also profoundly political.

Mary Kingsley 1896–1899

This chapter explores how Mary Kingsley believed the British merchants and traders in West Africa were better placed than missionaries or colonial officials to understand West African beliefs, laws and social practices; she supported the liquor trade. It looks at her two major books, Travels in West Africa and West African Studies, analyzing Kingsley’s literary style and the challenges her observations and arguments posed to the British colonial authorities and the Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain. In this chapter we see the emergence of Kingsley as a political campaigner for the rights of Africans, as she campaigns against the Hut Tax that was imposed on the people of Sierra Leone in 1898. The South African War offered her an excuse to leave England and return to the Africa she loved.

Voyaging Out

This chapter takes the reader through the months immediately preceding the departure to South Africa of the three protagonists of the book, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle and Mary Kingsley, in, respectively, January, February and March 1900. We see Rudyard and Carrie Kipling enduring their first Christmas without their daughter Josephine, and Kipling’s belief in the necessity and the good of war in South Africa, despite the military reversals of its early months; we see Conan Doyle throwing himself into war preparations and being inoculated against typhoid during the voyage; we see Mary Kingsley giving her last lecture in London at the Imperial Institute, and, on board ship, writing a critique of Christianity and a plea in favor of African nationalism, stressing the link between African land ownership and freedom from Western interference.

Something of Themselves

In early 1900, the paths of three British writers--Rudyard Kipling, Mary Kingsley and Arthur Conan Doyle--crossed in South Africa, during what has become known as Britain's last imperial war. Each of the three had pressing personal reasons to leave England behind, but they were also motivated by notions of duty, service, patriotism and, in Kipling's case, jingoism. Sarah LeFanu compellingly opens an unexplored chapter of these writers' lives, at a turning point for Britain and its imperial ambitions. Was the South African War, as Kipling claimed, a dress rehearsal for the Armageddon of World War One? Or did it instead foreshadow the anti-colonial guerrilla wars of the later twentieth century? Weaving a rich and varied narrative, LeFanu charts the writers' paths in the theatre of war, and explores how this crucial period shaped their cultural legacies, their shifting reputations, and their influence on colonial policy.

Rudyard Kipling 1897–1899

This chapter opens with the involvement of Cecil Rhodes in the failed Jameson Raid of 1895; on Kipling’s second visit to South Africa in 1898 he saw a great deal of Rhodes, travelling with him to the diamond mines at Kimberley, and on to the newly-acquired territory of Rhodesia, a journey that inspired two at least of the Just So stories. He became an ever-keener imperialist, and wrote, ‘The White Man’s Burden’. Mary Kingsley particularly disliked it. In this chapter Sir Edward Burne-Jones dies and six months later the Kiplings travel to New York, where Rudyard and Josephine, his beloved daughter, fall ill with pneumonia; Josephine dies. When war is declared in October 1899, Kipling leaps at the distraction from his profound grief, and rushes out a poem – ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’ – to raise money for the servicemen being sent to South Africa and their dependents.

Mary Kingsley

This chapter looks at Kingsley’s post-mortem legacy: most immediately how her concern for Boer POWS was translated by her friend Alice Stopford Green into an investigation of the dire conditions in which exiled Boers were held on St Helena. Journalist E. D. Morel was a great admirer of Mary Kingsley and her ideas on indirect rule lay behind his creation of the Congo Reform Association, which campaigned vigorously against the atrocities visited on the people of the Congo by the regime of Leopold II of Belgium. Kingsley’s friends Alice Stopford Green, John Holt and Roger Casement were also closely involved with the Congo Reform Association. Kingsley’s critique of cultural imperialism was the inspiration for the African Society, which promoted the kind of ethnology she had championed, while her researches into the terrible mortality of Europeans in West Africa inspired the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine’s Mary Kingsley Medal.

Mary Kingsley, Simon’s Town

This chapter follows Mary Kingsley to Simon’s Town and the Palace Barracks Hospital, where, from the beginning of April 1900, she was nursing Boer prisoners who, weakened during the ten-day Battle of Paardeberg when their only water was the carcass-choked Modder River, had fallen victim to typhoid. It quotes from her letters that give in graphic detail a picture of the terrible conditions in which she worked, of the delirious patients, of the ghastly deaths. Kingsley herself contracted typhoid from her patients, which led to a perforated bowel, and, after an unsuccessful operation, her death at the age of 37. She was buried at sea with full military honors. Her death is memorialized by Kipling in his poem ‘Dirge of Dead Sisters’.

Mary Kingsley to 1895

This chapter covers Mary Kingsley’s birth and how she was only just born into legitimacy – four days after the marriage of her parents – a fact she later did her best to obscure. The chapter suggests that Kingsley’s anxiety over the respectability of her origins was to do with the need to be morally irreproachable because of the radical nature of the ideas she espoused. The chapter presents Kingsley’s lonely childhood, her conflicted class position, her lack of formal education (in contrast to her brother), her voracious reading, her domestic duties and her eventual liberation from them when her parents died in 1892. It describes her travels in West Africa as a natural scientist and ethnographer, her sympathy for and friendship with the traders she met, and the freedom from the constraints of a woman’s life in Victorian England.