ABSTRACT
Mary Kingsley (1862–1900) was a traveller and the niece of the novelist Charles Kingsley. After her parents’ death when she was thirty she went alone to West Africa in order to complete a work on native religion and law which her father, an explorer, had not been able to fìnish. She made many valuable observations. The impression of her, a Victorian spinster alone except for her umbrella in ‘Darkest Africa’ is formidable. Nowadays she would probably be a Professor of Anthropology. Her book Travels in West Africa, 1897, is extremely original and unbiased. She died nursing prisoners at Simon’s Town during the Boer War
