Travelling Across the Colonial Frontier: Female Mobility and the Making of English National Identity in H. Rider Haggard’s Benita: An African Romance

Abstract Given his most famous account, “I can safely say that there is not a petticoat in the whole history” of his most well-known romance, King Solomon’s Mines (1885), H. Rider Haggard’s works have been mostly celebrated as significant examples of the representation of imperial masculinities in the late Victorian romance fiction. In this typical imperialist narrative, Africa provides a setting for British boys to become men (Brantlinger, 1988). This paper, however, suggests that this notion of male mobility is replaced by the portrayal of a female traveller in Haggard’s Benita: An African Romance (1906). Benita’s sea journey from Southampton to Durban also brings gender roles into question in Haggard’s long lost travel text. This article, thus, will explore Haggard’s work in the broad Victorian context of political, philosophical and racial beliefs, and investigate the role of female travellers in the construction of national identity.