The Anglo-Boer War of 1899 in female narratives of travel in South Africa

On 11 October 1899 the Republic of Transvaal declared war on England. No sooner did war break out than Cape Colony was flooded with patriotic British civilians, amongst whom many females. Sarah Wilson, Dosia Bagot and Violet Brooke-Hunt also travelled to South Africa; they approached the battlefields. Interestingly in their narratives, the heroines do not penetrate a world dominated by male bellicism; they step into a gentle enchanting realm imbued with childish sensitivity and Arthurian gallantry, though haunted by potency-thirsty Boer Circes. The authors' overlooking the bloody colonial battles that wreaked havoc upon the Transvaal can be construed as their refusing to see the sexual metropolitan battles that were being waged by a feminist movement which was seemingly threatening the Isle with an apocalyptic sterility. The writing of the turn-of-the-century Anglo-Boer war can be viewed as a weapon used in a war over female territory; a war that was not over with the treaty signed in Vereeniging in 1902.