ABSTRACT
Home Notes was a widely circulated monthly publication that was first published by Sir Arthur Pearson in 1891. It was a better production than some of its rivals (Northcliffe’s Forget Me Not and also Home Sweet Home) in the 1890s, and offered advice on household management, fashion tips, reports and a free dress pattern. 1 The document here is a feature that Home Notes ran titled ‘Uncrowned Queens’, which provided the reader with short biographies of women who were pioneers in a particular field. In this issue, Mrs Theodore (Mabel) Bent is featured, who was a noted explorer of zones of the Empire. In 1891, Theodore Bent, a member of the Royal Geographical Society, had mounted an expedition to Mashonaland to excavate the ruins of the Great Zimbabwe in the belief that the Phoenicians had migrated to South Africa from the Middle East. This feature notes Mabel’s capacity to organise an expedition that bettered that of H. M. Stanley. Other women featured in the series were the romantic novelist Emily Lovett Cameron (sister-in-law of Verney Lovett Cameron, the first European to cross central Africa from ocean to ocean), whose best-known novel was In a Grass Country which ran to nine editions (1885), and South African author Olive Schreiner.
