Beyond Gold and Diamonds

Melissa Free

Description

Beyond Gold and Diamonds demonstrates the importance of southern Africa to British literature from the 1880s to the 1920s, from the rise of the systematic exploitation of the region's mineral wealth to the aftermath of World War I. It focuses on fiction by the colonial-born Olive Schreiner, southern Africa's first literary celebrity, as well as by H. Rider Haggard, Gertrude Page, and John Buchan, its most influential authorial informants, British authors who spent significant time in the region and wrote about it as insiders. Tracing the ways in which generic innovation enabled these writers to negotiate cultural and political concerns through a uniquely British South African lens, Melissa Free argues that British South African literature constitutes a distinct field, one that overlaps with but also exists apart from both a national South African literary tradition and a tradition of South African literature in English. The various genres that British South African novelists introduced—the New Woman novel, the female colonial romance, the Rhodesian settler romance, and the modern spy thriller—anticipated metropolitan literary developments while consolidating Britain's sense of its own dominion in a time of increasing opposition.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
A Note on Terminology

Introduction: A Single Frame: Southern Africa, Britain, and the Authorial Informant

1. Preterdomesticity and the South African Farm: Women Old and New

2. "It Is I Who Have the Power": The Female Colonial Romance

3. Colony of Dreadful Delight: Gertrude Page and the Rhodesian Settler Romance

4. "There Will Be No More Kings in Africa": Foreclosing Darkness in Prester John

Epilogue: Beyond the British South African Novel

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• Royaume-Uni
• Gender studies
• Africa
• Great Britain
• Stephen Ireland
• United Kingdom
• 20th century
• Ireland
• Reino Unido

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 3
• EAN13: 9781438481548
• Langue: English

Extrait

BEYOND GOLD AND DIAMONDS
SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

Pamela K. Gilbert, editor
BEYOND GOLD AND DIAMONDS
G ENRE, THE A UTHORIAL I NFORMANT, AND THE B RITISH S OUTH A FRICAN N OVEL
M ELISSA F REE
Cover illustration adapted from The Story of “South Africa” Newspaper and Its Founder, Told by Others , South Africa, 1903, opposite contents, Internet Archive , archive.org/details/storyofsouthafri00londuoft/page/n6/mode/1up . Cover design by Patrick W. Berry.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Free, Melissa, author.
Title: Beyond gold and diamonds : genre, the authorial informant, and the British South African novel / Melissa Free, author.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Series: SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438481531 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438481548 (ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my parents, Gayle Covey and Steven Devico 6x
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
A Note on Terminology
Introduction A Single Frame: Southern Africa, Britain, and the Authorial Informant
Chapter 1 Preterdomesticity and the South African Farm: Women Old and New
Chapter 2 “It Is I Who Have the Power”: The Female Colonial Romance
Chapter 3
Colony of Dreadful Delight: Gertrude Page and the Rhodesian Settler Romance
Chapter 4 “There Will Be No More Kings in Africa”: Foreclosing Darkness in Prester John
Epilogue Beyond the British South African Novel
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Illustrations
Map From A History of South Africa , by Dorothea Fairbridge
I.1 South Africa: A Weekly Journal for All Interested in South African Affairs
1.1 Advertisement for one of the four film versions of Jess produced between 1905 and 1917
2.1 “The Zulu leapt into the air”
3.1 From Page to screen
3.2 Page in the company of Kipling and Haggard
3.3 Gertrude Page
3.4 Gertrude Page in modern attire
Acknowledgments
Joe Valente, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty have inspired every page of this manuscript. My gratitude at having been able to work with them is beyond measure.
Patrick W. Berry, Pat Kennedy, and Joe Corless have been consistent, generous, loving allies. They have championed my work and enhanced every aspect of my life. I aspire not only to think like them but also to be like them.
I am grateful for the time and insight of more readers than I can remember, but I will try. Friends, peers, and colleagues who have read and commented on multiple drafts of the manuscript include Peter Garrett, Terra Walston Joseph, Keguro Macharia, Danielle Kinsey (who came up with the title of chapter 3 ), Praseeda Gopinath, Don LePan, Elizabeth Horan, Dan Bivona, Ron Broglio, Tobias Harper, and Christine Holbo. Others who have read and advised me on some of the work include Jay Michael Lane, Rachel Ablow, Mike Goode, Supritha Raja, Coran Klaver, Ann Colley, Kevin Morrison, Libby Tucker Gould, Scott Henkel, Nicholas D. Nace, Juliet John, Isaac Joslin, Leila May, and Cannon Schmitt. Paul Cox, curator of the Woburn Sands Collection, shared with me what he knew of Gertrude Page.
Friends and family who have supported and encouraged me include Sho-Yin Chen-Berry, Emma Berry, Catherine Lidov, Jodi Marshall, Ellis Bacon Jr., Alex Crump, Amanda Roth Klaas, Katherine Piatti, Bob Swinford, Katrina Royce-Malmgren, Beppe Cuello, the Nieves family, Corrine Whitmore, Virginia Shirley, Deb Hibbard, Matt LaBarre, Marnie Jostes, Brad Irish, Marie Webb, Tracy Morehouse, Tara Ison, Matt Cordial, and the Night Squad, especially Margery Rose-Clapp, Melanie and Alice Spatgen, Lisa Chamberlain, Cheryl Gibson, Cynthia and Blueberry Lim, and Marc Leichter. Cheryl Lawyer got me over the finish line when I hit the wall; she kept me sane and laughing these last long miles.
My sweet grandfather Perley Covey sent me a $100 a month to assist with living expenses when I started my doctoral program. He gave me what he called a fifty percent “raise” two years later. I miss him and wish that I could put this book in his hands. My little Uncle Danny and my grandmother Julia Covey are a part of all that I do. Dottie Buttler, Maureen and Bob Edelblut, and Geline Covey believed in me and told me so.
My mom, Gayle Covey, and my dad, Steven Devico, are in a class by themselves. My mom got me my first library card and ensured that I received the best education possible—at Caedmon, Chapin, Duke, North Carolina State University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. My dad put me first more times that I can count, and more, I am sure, than I will ever know. They were major donors not only to my education but also to my health and happiness.
Miss Judith Phelps made me want to be an English major. Professor George Williams made me accountable. And Carol Neely bought me time. Charlotte Brontë made me fall in love with words on a page, particularly those placed there in the nineteenth century. The work of Anne McClintock and Laura Chrisman set me on the path to this manuscript.
My four-leggeds—Pumpkin, Grimmy, Barack O’Bunny, Munchkin, Odie, and Opal—reminded me that what really matters is a warm place to sleep, a romp out of doors, and some occasional cuddles.
The project has received support from the English departments at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Binghamton University, State University of New York, and Arizona State University; the Graduate College, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, all at the University of Illinois; and State University of New York / United University Professions. It has also benefited from the anonymous readers and editorial team at State University of New York Press. The epilogue, in particular, has been substantially improved by the readers’ suggestions.
This book would not be what it is without interlibrary loan. Those who work there are the unsung heroes of good research. I am grateful to the interlibrary loan departments at my home institutions, the University of Illinois, Binghamton University, and Arizona State University, as well as at other departments, where people whose names I will never know pulled, scanned, and packaged material.
Portions of the introduction and of chapters 1, 2, and 3 include revisions of material that was previously published as “British Women Wanted: Gender, Genre, and South African Settlement,” The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture , ed. Juliet John, Oxford UP, 2016, 284–309. It is reproduced here by permission of Oxford University Press ( global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-victorian-literary-culture-9780199593736?cc=us lang=en ). Chapter 2 also contains revisions of material that was previously published as “ ‘It Is I Who Have the Power’: Settling Women in Haggard’s South African Imaginary,” Genre , vol. 45, no. 3, Fall 2012, 359–93.
Beyond Gold and Diamonds , long in the writing, is even longer in the making. Its roots lie in my experience as a teenage backpacker, seated at a café in Greece with a young white South African woman. It was the tail end of apartheid, and when the waiter, whose ethnicity and nationality I do not know, discovered where my companion Helena was from, he refused to serve her, a gesture of disapproval for her country’s racist policies. I can still picture her face, the pain at being held accountable for a system she abhorred vying with … gratitude? relief? approval? (there is no right word) … that the outside world was finally putting appropriate pressure on South Africa to end apartheid. Many years later, when I read Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm for the first time, I was struck by how absolutely Lyndall saw herself as English, despite never having been to England. Though I would later learn that for most South Africans in the period English denoted British lineage, Lyndall’s identification was more than a name; it was also a desire. I have often wondered how these two pieces fit together, or perhaps why it is that I hold them together in my mind. In my memory, a late twentieth-century young South African woman feels she cannot claim her own identity because it is linked to a system of oppression that she opposes. In Schreiner’s novel, a late nineteenth-century young South African woman claims an identity not truly her own because it affords her privilege. For Helena and Lyndall, both white women of British descent, South Africa was the home that could never be home.
It is this paradox that Beyond Gold and Diamonds seeks to explore. It does so primarily through the authorial informant, who is herself always only partially at home, as she is also always partially in exile. Perhaps that is why gen