Physical description

Hard cover book.
Author: Cecil Howard
Publisher: Hutchinson & Co
Date: 1957
Further Information: Hardcover bound with dust cover intact with portrait frontispiece lettering in black. The spine has a Library label with an inscription.

Publication type

non-fiction

Inscriptions & markings

The label on the spine with typed text PAT 920 KIN
Front loose end paper has a stamp from Warrnambool Public Library
Front loose end paper has a sticker from Corangamite Regional Library Service

Summary

Mary Kingsley is a popular biography of Mary Henrietta Kingsley (1862–1900), the English explorer, travel writer, and self-taught ethnographer known for her solo travels through West Africa (Sierra Leone, Angola, Gabon, Cameroon) in 1893–95. She collected zoological specimens for the British Museum, wrote sympathetically about African religions, law, and customs that challenged many contemporary European prejudices of the time, and published two influential books of her own: Travels in West Africa (1897) and West African Studies (1899). She died of typhoid while nursing Boer prisoners during the Second Boer War in 1900. Howard's book retells her life and travels for a general readership, and descriptions call it a lively account drawn from "the raciest and most exciting passages" of her own travel writing, tracing her journeys along the Ogowe River and through West African swamps.