Adventurous Girls of the British Empire: The Pre-War Novels of Bessie Marchant

Historically, the genre of adventure fiction most readily recalls books for boys and male heroes rather than girl readers and protagonists. These include enduringly well-known works such as H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) and She (1887), the early to mid-Victorian boys' stories of Frederick Marryat, W. H. G. Kingston, and R. M. Ballantyne and the late-Victorian G. A. Henty's tales (his more than one hundred adventure stories sold in excess of 25 million copies).¹ The novel of adventure at the conclusion of the nineteenth century recounted tales of male exploration on land or sea, and quests or conquests in real or imagined lands removed from the gentility of civilized England. These generic features were aligned with masculine traits of activity and strength, and while girls could and did indeed read boys' adventure books, examples with female protagonists were uncommon in the Victorian period. Joseph Bristow argues that between 1870 and 1900, "narratives celebrating empire and techniques in teaching reading and writing gradually converged . . . [B]oth inside and outside the classroom, there was more and more emphasis on heroic adventure, and this involved a number of shifts in attitude towards juvenile publishing and curriculum design" (20–21). The works Bristow refers to were, of course, written by male authors about masculine adventurers.

The novels of Bessie Marchant—sometimes called "the girls' Henty"²—began to be published as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Her girl heroines act independently in isolated areas in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, South America, India, South Africa, Siberia, and Central America. From 1894 until her death in 1941, Marchant wrote more than a 130 novels, many of which celebrated the capacity of British or colonial girls to rise to any challenge set before them in rugged environments. As J. S. Bratton argues, Marchant is one of the few writers of the period who could produce a narrative in which girls confronted with story flashpoints involving violence did not faint (201). She presents girl protagonists who display physical strength, exert independence, and, in some cases, challenge British race and class ideology, yet are considered "worthy" representations of femininity. The emergent popularity of a girls' adventure genre, decades after the publication of equivalent books for boys, speaks not only about the development of texts for the girl reader, but also about the place constructed for girls within the Empire in response to British imperial anxieties.

Marchant's novels function as rehearsals of colonial life or potential war in which men may be absent. They regulate appropriate moments where work that would ordinarily be a marker of unfeminine traits is not only acceptable, but is in fact admirable. Mirroring a historical cultural climate of "readiness" for war and preparation for life in the colonies, Marchant's girl heroines engage in adventure only out of necessity. Adventurous acts are performed to ensure survival in rough environments, save lives, and prevent crime. The task of empire is depicted as inherently arduous and outdoor work is often inescapable for girls. That is, however, until the frequent plot resolution of marriage contains the necessity of most forms of adventure and sometimes removes the heroine's independent rule over property. The heroine's domestic responsibility cannot be abrogated when threats, such as those posed by a rugged colonial or imperial environment, dissipate. However, it is important to note that Marchant's novels are not preoccupied with maintaining British identity in foreign lands. Firstly, they do not, in most instances, present the heroines engaging in any meaningful contact with indigenous inhabitants. The minor attention devoted to indigenous inhabitants limits opportunities to mark out racial and cultural differences through the performance of a "civilizing" function. Similarly, the fact that several of Marchant's heroines remain unmarried indicates a lack of anxiety about containing threats of miscegenation.

Marchant's novels were well received at the time of publication, and her reputation for creating adventurous heroines was not sufficiently subversive to prevent the conservative Religious Tract Society from publishing some of them (albeit not the girls' adventures with...