Death in the Cape – the lonely fate of Mary Kingsley

What compelled three well-known British writers to leave their homes and travel 6,000 miles to participate in a nasty late-19th-century conflict in the far-off South African veldt? This question lies at the heart of Sarah Lefanu’s excellent analysis of how Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle and Mary Kingsley found themselves following the flag in Britain’s last great imperial war.

Her book starts with concise biographical introductions to these protagonists, up to the start of what is still widely known as the Boer War in 1899. We get the familiar Kipling odyssey from Bombay, through fostering in the ‘House of Desolation’ in Southsea to journalism in Lahore. Marriage took him to Vermont, where he started a family and fine-tuned his thinking on Britain and empire. After returning to England, he visited South Africa, which he saw as a tabula rasa for the style of colonial administration he had so admired in India.