Mary Kingsley

Mary Kingsley had no formal education — she was taught at home, largely to keep her free to nurse her invalid parents — and did not travel until both parents died in 1892, when she was 30. Within two years she was in West Africa with a carpetbag and a black dress, trading cloth for rubber and ivory with communities that had limited contact with Europeans.

Her Travels in West Africa (1897) was an immediate bestseller. It is funny, precise, and genuinely knowledgeable — Kingsley spent time with the Fang people of Gabon, who had a reputation for cannibalism that she considered greatly exaggerated, and she wrote about West African culture with more respect and curiosity than almost any contemporary. She was also practically useful: she learned from traders and fishermen, she understood the forest, and she climbed Mount Cameroon via a route that no European had attempted.

The book's comedy comes largely from the contrast between Kingsley's Victorian propriety — she wore the full dress, she observed the conventions — and the extraordinary circumstances she found herself in. She once fell into an elephant trap, noted that her petticoats had prevented injury, and climbed out.

She died of enteric fever in 1900 while nursing Boer War prisoners in South Africa. She was 37.