Mary Kingsley to 1895

This chapter covers Mary Kingsley’s birth and how she was only just born into legitimacy – four days after the marriage of her parents – a fact she later did her best to obscure. The chapter suggests that Kingsley’s anxiety over the respectability of her origins was to do with the need to be morally irreproachable because of the radical nature of the ideas she espoused. The chapter presents Kingsley’s lonely childhood, her conflicted class position, her lack of formal education (in contrast to her brother), her voracious reading, her domestic duties and her eventual liberation from them when her parents died in 1892. It describes her travels in West Africa as a natural scientist and ethnographer, her sympathy for and friendship with the traders she met, and the freedom from the constraints of a woman’s life in Victorian England.