Mary Kingsley

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MK 's two lengthy travel books about West Africa feature personal experience (including sharply amusing anecdotes) and comment on African culture, politics, and biology. As well as books, she penned essays for periodicals and letters to newspapers on the same themes, and a memoir of her father. Though viewed by some as a New Woman figure because of her independence as a late Victorian traveller and a thinker, she was opposed to the contemporary women's movement, and her critique of the crown colony system was aimed at improving rather than dismantling it.
Black and white photograph of Mary Kingsley in profile, seated in a wooden chair. She is wearing a black pillbox hat that ties under her chin, and a dark dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves.

Milestones

13 October 1862

MK , future ichthyologist, travel writer, and ethnographer, was born in Islington, four days after her parents' marriage.
MK did not become aware of the circumstances of her birth until after her parents' deaths in 1892, when she discovered their marriage licence and her birth certificate. Her official birthday had been altered in order to obscure her narrow escape from illegitimacy.
Frank, Katherine. A Voyager Out: The Life of Mary Kingsley. Houghton Mifflin.
50
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder.
Frank, Katherine. A Voyager Out: The Life of Mary Kingsley. Houghton Mifflin.
50

August 1894

MK approached George Macmillan , her uncle Charles 's publisher, with the manuscript The Bights of Benin.
Frank, Katherine. A Voyager Out: The Life of Mary Kingsley. Houghton Mifflin.
91

21 January 1897

MK published her popular Travels in West Africa, which combines travel writing, ethnography, and colonial politics.
Frank, Katherine. A Voyager Out: The Life of Mary Kingsley. Houghton Mifflin.
230

3 June 1900

MK died in Simon's Town, Cape Colony, after contracting typhoid or enteric fever from the patients she had been nursing.
Frank, Katherine. A Voyager Out: The Life of Mary Kingsley. Houghton Mifflin.
297

August 1900

MK 's last piece of writing was a posthumously published letter to the New Africa journal (published in Monrovia, Liberia) on race relations between Africans and Europeans.
Kingsley, Mary. West African Studies. Macmillan.
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Biography

Birth and Family

Birth

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