When E. M. Hull, author of the best-selling desert romance The Sheik, which we remember today in the 1921 movie adaptation that made Rudolph Valentino famous, came out with a non-fiction travel narrative entitled Camping in the Sahara, reviewers were astonished. "Lurid memories of 'The Sheik'," The Saturday Review of Literature assured its readers, "need deter no one from reading with considerable pleasure Mrs. Hull's account of her wanderings through the Algerian Sahara by camel train." The review concludes with the hope "that Mrs. Edith Maude Hull will continue to write travel books for her soul's good and sheik fiction, if she must, for her bank account's profit" (June 18,1927: 920).
The desert and jungle romances that flourished in the 1920s are not, however, the antithesis of travel writing, but, for English women, its complement. Many travelers, both male and female, wrote fiction. The imperial and adventure fiction by male travelers and administrators such as H. Rider Haggard, George Alfred Henty, A. C. G. Hastings, and Sir Harry Johnston reinforce the themes of their non-fiction writing. But women travelers' stories of plucky young Englishwomen who travel to Africa and there find romance explore ideas untouchable in autobiographical travel narrative. Early in her 1912 travel narrative Alone in West Africa, Mary Gaunt declares "any mingling of the races" to be "unthinkable" (16). Yet two of her three preceding novels concern just that. Under cover of fictional personae and the conventions of romance, women writers question the three supporting legs of patriarchal-imperial ideology: white government of blacks, patriarchal control of white women, and, the linchpin of the first two, the taboo against interracial sex.
We are used to thinking of travel writing as a kind of fiction. This paper will examine the romances of three serious travelers and popular writers of the 1920s--E. M. Hull, Mary Gaunt, and Lady Dorothy Mills--as a kind of travel writing. For white women travelers in colonial Africa, white men, who bring European culture and control to Africa, and Africans, the Others to be changed and controlled, personify the poles of travel experience, home and away. In the 1920s, a fantasy genre that allowed respectable white women travelers to question their relationship to white men and Africans may have served the function of travel writing more effectively than the chronicles we as well as contemporary reviewers take more seriously.
The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and
employer.
© Regents of the University of Minnesota, 1997.