The Early Empire Fiction of Ernest Glanville: On the Border

Over his lifetime Ernest Glanville (1855-1925) wrote some seventeen novels and romances, four collections of shorter fiction, many newspaper articles, several travel guides and at least one promotional brochure advertising farmland in the Karoo. These last expository works are still entirely unsurveyed. Glanville's work contributed to a diverse and powerful literature that does not derive from the familiar social and geographical terrain of England or America but instead reflects the imaginatively rich and far-flung scenes of South Africa. Not only was Glanville published by outstanding presses—Chatto, Methuen, Constable, Jonathan Cape—but his reviews in the Athenæum, Speaker, Academy, Graphic, Spectator, Idler, Saturday Review, and newspapers such as the Manchester Guardian were notably laudatory. Varying social and political contexts produce differing constructions of value; those one nation or era embraces another may to its imaginative impoverishment ignore. Until recently the whole genre of the South African high romance of empire has been undervalued by the intellectual fashionistas despite (or because of) its original popular appeal. The purpose of this article is to create the first scholarly profile of Glanville's life in conjunction with an assessment of his breakthrough fiction, provisionally aligning him with other preeminent contemporary writers of empire.

This is an undertaking no critic can venture upon without peril of controversy. Olive Schreiner disparagingly had suggested suspenseful adventures of the frontier were "best written in Piccadilly or in the Strand: there the gifts of the creative imagination, untrammeled by contact with any fact, may spread their wings." ¹ The major error is to suppose that all empire romances owe their generic origins and values to the sensational "penny dreadfuls" of England or the cheap "dime novels" of America. Contra Schreiner, writers such as H. Rider Haggard, Bertram Mitford, and Ernest Glanville lived and worked in the South Africa of which they wrote, their historical characters often personally known to them. ² The generic roots of their work lay in travel literature, in narratives by explorers, hunters, and nature writers, in biography and natural history, in missionary and ethnographic accounts, and, certainly for Glanville, in feature writing and news journalism. Not only can there be sharp realism even when writing of African myth and magic, but these "histories of wild adventure; of cattle driven into inaccessible 'kranzes' by Bushmen; 'of encounters with ravening lions, and hair-breadth escapes'"—as Schreiner so tartly describes such works (even before many of them were produced)—put one in mind of David Livingstone's classic Missionary Travels (1857) which opened with a ravening lion: "I saw the lion just in the act of springing upon me. I was upon a little height; he caught my shoulder as he sprang, and we both came to the ground below together. Growling horribly close to my ear, he shook me as a terrier dog does a rat." ³ Facing Livingstone's account is a full page illustration of the dazed missionary under a definitely "ravening lion," very much in need of that forthcoming "hair-breadth escape."

Actually, for Glanville and his peers, their lively personal observations of the Xhosa, Zulu and other indigenous peoples, and their use of narrative voice and irony are anything but formulaic, trivial products of Piccadilly or the Strand; these "ethnoadventures" provide first-hand insights into the cultural ideologies and conflicts of the era, no less than did Livingstone's best-selling memoir. Owing to his frontier environment, Glanville was particularly responsive to what today we call "third space" or borderland thresholds. Writers living on the border have a firsthand opportunity to instruct and enliven by detailing the processes of cultural interchange, often expressed directly in correspondence and diaries or in artfully reconstructed incidents for fiction. Glanville's fiction may be regarded as noteworthy because it posits a social and political alternative to the industrializing capitalism of empire. In the arena of this borderland liminality—of human actions, emotions, and the possibilities of moral choice, of person against person, of person against the environment—Glanville delineates the perennial qualities of strength and frailty and foregrounds the search for an identity inspired by a...