10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 1 Introduction Located at the fringes of what might count as ‘adventure fiction’ proper, the two texts at the centre of attention in this article, Mary Jane Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857) and Mary Henrietta Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa (1897), combine life-writing, travel literature, micro-historiography, and (auto-)ethnography (Salih, “Gallant Heart” 173; Pratt, Imperial Eyes 7) while frequently drawing on the anecdotal as a narrative mode� 2 Both authors, neither of whom was formally educated, became quite famous during their respective lifetimes, to which articles and poems in Punch magazine testify� 3 Seacole, proclaimed by Jane Robinson’s biography to be “the most famous Black Woman of the Victorian Age”, was “free-born” (Fish 475) and “a Creole” (WA 11) who described herself as “only a little brown - a few shades duskier than the brunettes whom you all admire so much” (13)� Kingsley was white but also of ‘mixed extraction’ as far as class was concerned: her father had married his pregnant servant and together they had averted, as Dea Birkett suggests, the social stigmatisation which would have followed their child’s illegitimacy by a “shotgun wedding” (Adventuress 15). Both Seacole and Kingsley, therefore, were figures of the third, in a sense; simultaneously inand outsiders or, to borrow the title of Stuart Hall’s autobiography, ‘familiar strangers’� Both were also products of British imperialism 1 I am indebted to Anecdotal Theory in more than one way, and my title pays homage to Jane Gallop who, alluding to Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, called her collection’s article on Lacan and Derrida “A Tale of Two Jacques”� 2 Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands is henceforth shortened to WA in in-text citations� To distinguish between Kingsley’s works, Travels in West Africa is shortened to TWA , while Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons is shortened to CCC in in-text citations. 3 The magazine honoured “Dame Seacole” in a poem (“A Stir”) she found flattering enough to include in Wonderful Adventures and helped raise money for “Mother Seacole”, portrayed in a cartoon as “our own vivandière” (“Our Very Own Vivandière”)� It also mildly lampooned Kingsley, by allusion, in a satirical poem, some verses of which refer to “a lady an explorer? A traveller in skirts? ” who - at least according to voices that opposed the Royal Geographical Society opening its doors to female members - “mustn’t, can’t, and shan’t be geographic” (“To the Royal Geographical Society”)� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 320 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 (although during different phases) who staged themselves (albeit in different ways) as British subjects, remained positioned firmly within imperialism’s ideological framework, and - perhaps most disturbingly - both occasionally made use of “the period’s racist language” (Om 90)� Kingsley even adhered to polygenism - a racist/ racial theory already outdated at the time that claimed “that Africans were not a lower or less developed form of Europeans, but essentially different” (Birkett, Adventuress 69) -, which she combined with a vigorous defence of African cultures (93)� In Seacole’s case, there is a lively scholarly debate on how she positions herself in relation to the Empire and its underlying ideology� Some suggest that Seacole - strategically or not - identifies with “the colonizing paradigm, with its assumption of Western superiority and endorsement of empire” (Fish 479), which has been read as an “endorsement of affective imperialism” (Salih, “Gallant Heart” 175)� Others claim that she “makes a joke out of her position as colonial mimic” and “revels in her performance of Englishness” (Poon 504), thus not only supports but also creolises (Chang) and “undermines the values of the imperium” (McKenna 221), even “disrupt[ing] the ‘master narratives’ of both the literary and imperial authority systems” (Hawthorne 315-316)� Om concedes that Seacole “does speak the language of the empire” but argues that “she does so to unsettle the empire’s fundamental assumptions about race” (97), which ultimately makes Wonderful Adventures a subversive text that must be read as a “nuanced challenge to […] racism” (79), specifically in its function of justifying imperialism� To sum up, the spectrum of positions ascribed to Seacole is broad� There is no doubt that Kingsley was a life-long supporter of colonialism� Birkett describes her as “a self-confessed and active imperialist” who “never challeng[ed] the right of Britain to colonial expansion in Africa” (Adventuress 95)� Also, it is generally accepted that Kingsley’s work is “merely aimed at improving rather than dismantling colonialism” (Mills 153)� At the same time, she has also been hailed as a radical defender/ proponent/ advocate of “cultural relativism” who criticised and fought individual imperial policies, driven by the “utopian desire” to realise “her conception of a humane colonialism” (Gikandi 150). Gikandi has also argued that this justifies the claim that “Kingsley’s experiences parallel those of colonial subjects such as Seacole” (146) and that this is the reason why Travels just as much as Wonderful Adventures needs to be read as “a discourse that exists both inside and outside colonialism” (ibid�)� Although the different paradoxes in Seacole’s and Kingsley’s (self-) representations - and the fault lines that develop because of them - are fascinating, I will not join in disentangling, tracing, and debating them� Instead, I would like to add to the discussion of Kingsley’s and Sea- Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 321 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 cole’s textual strategies by posing the question of how both the anecdote (as a genre) and the anecdotal (as a mode) serve the goal of these two authors to inscribe themselves into literary traditions that did not open easily to female and / or black writers� Neither Seacole nor Kingsley was a stranger to the ‘pleasures of peril’, and although both blithely blew to smithereens contemporary notions of passivity as essentially feminine, neither of them, while enjoying these pleasures, was willing to give up her claim to being a lady� Both actively sought out what Mary Louise Pratt has described as “contact zones” (“Arts” 34), but while Seacole spent substantial parts of her long life in these “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths” (ibid�), Kingsley could only make three trips to Africa before she died of typhoid fever while nursing soldiers during the Boer War� Seacole, a widow who had learned nursing and how to run a guesthouse from her mother, traces her “affection for a camp-life, and […] sympathy with […] ‘the pomp, pride, and circumstance of glorious war’” (WA 11) back to her Scottish father, a soldier in the British army� After travelling the Caribbean and running a hotel in Panama and before she returned to her native Kingston, Jamaica, she made her way from the Empire’s periphery to its centre� Having presented herself in London to volunteer as a nurse for the Crimean War and having been rejected - most probably due to reasons of race and age (she was fifty, at the time) -, she travelled to the Black sea peninsula under her own steam, opened the British Hotel with an officers’ mess, “two miles from Balaclava” (Salih, “Chronology” x), and tended to the sick and wounded, the badly fitted-out, and the hungry (Palmer n� p�)� Kingsley, a spinster who had “rarely ventured beyond the garden gate” (Birkett, Adventuress 8) during her youth, nursed her mother for years while her absentee father - a physician - accompanied his wealthy clients around the world� After having lost both parents within a few weeks, she left the Empire’s centre to finally experience life at the ‘periphery’, specifically the Congo, first-hand rather than through her father’s library of travel books (10)� She chose climes to which only few white people had been, to collect and study “fish and fetish” (Brisson 326), and travelled to remote regions in long skirts and blouses buttoned to the neck, overcoming more than one life-threatening encounter with wild animals along the way� Describing some of the indigenous peoples’ social conventions, most famously fetishist and cannibalistic practices, Kingsley stressed the Africans’ rationality and aimed to explain these customs’ internal logic (Birkett, “Kingsley” n� p�)� 322 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 The editorial histories of Seacole’s and Kingsley’s texts differ somewhat in terms of availability� Although Wonderful Adventures, published in two editions during the nineteenth century (Salih, “Chronology” liii), was internationally and widely reviewed (Staring-Derks et al� 518), it subsequently went out of print for a long time. Seacole herself became “a forgotten figure” (Alexander and Dewjee 45) soon after her death until feminist scholars brought her to public attention again and “republished her narrative in 1984” (Om 77)� Oxford University Press (1988) included Wonderful Adventures into its programme only a few years later, it being after all “one of the first travel memoirs published by a black woman” (Lee and Erikson 68)� Even more recently, Penguin (2005) republished it as part of its classics series while Routledge (2015) anthologised a section of it� By comparison, Kingsley’s Travels, “an immediate bestseller” (Birkett, Adventuress 81) and “outstanding success” (89) that was also broadly reviewed at the time, fared better in terms of uninterrupted accessibility. Less than half a year after it first came out in January 1897, “five editions were in circulation, including an abridged version designed for a wider audience” (Blunt, “Mapping” 56)� In the course of the twentieth century, at least three popular editions were issued and there are currently at least five in print. Moreover, excerpts from Travels are frequently included in collections issued on both sides of the Atlantic� 4 For a while, particularly during the 1980s, scholarly interest in British women travel writers tended to produce what Blunt, listing a few examples (Travel 44), terms “descriptive and often primarily anecdotal accounts celebrating intrepid, eccentric individuals” (34)� My article, too, deals with two female Britons who wrote about their adventures in foreign parts, and I am likewise interested in the anecdote as a genre as well as the anecdotal as a narrative mode� The latter, however, is not an organising principle of my own study but rather the focal point of my analysis� In other words, instead of writing anecdotally about Seacole and Kingsley, I am interested in their use of anec- 4 For example, Unsuitable for Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellers (1994), Victorian Prose: An Anthology (1999), Victorian Travel Writing and Imperial Violence (2003), The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Prose 1832-1900 (2012), or A Woman’s Place in the World: An Anthology of Victorian Travel Narratives (2019)� In the following, I shall quote Seacole from the Penguin edition� For citations from Kingsley, I shall rely on the edition by National Geographic (2002)� Like most currently available print editions, this abridged version compresses three of Kingsley’s original twenty-eight chapters into one and completely omits five others as well as all of the appendices. In addition to this, it does not contain one of the anecdotes I am going to discuss in detail, which is why I shall be drawing, where necessary, on the digital version of Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons, published by Cambridge University Press (2010)� Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 323 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 dotes and in what these do to the balance between life writing and adventure fiction in their work. My article’s core claim is that anecdotes play a crucial role in both authors’ self-representations, that it is in fact due to their anecdotes that Seacole’s and Kingsley’s texts achieved their respective goals: ensuring financial survival for the former and carving out a career as a public persona for the latter� Retaining their humorous flatness, anecdotes work, on one level, as entertainment� But at least some of them also offer themselves as small spaces of critical self-reflection against the backdrop of imperial ideology and colonialist practice because of the way in which they - frequently, if not always - incorporate the perspective of the (cultural or non-human) ‘other’� Since a contribution on two autobiographical texts needs to be justified within the context of a volume on adventure fiction, I shall first, in the section “Colonial Tales of Adventure”, show how Seacole and Kingsley position themselves and their texts in relation to adventure and how scholars have perceived these relations. Then, I shall discuss some of the fictionalising elements in Seacole’s and Kingsley’s factual accounts� In order to substantiate my core thesis, the section “Anecdotal Theories” offers an overview of how the anecdote, in its characteristic unverifiability, has been defined and described within academic discourse in its relation to fact, truth, and history and what contentions have been made about its potential to stabilise, support, supplement, undermine, disrupt, and act as a method to help think through theoretical issues� The last part of this contribution, “Anecdotal Adventures”, is dedicated to analysing four examples - the hencoop and the gold anecdote from Wonderful Adventures and the Silurian and the game-hunting anecdote from Travels in West Africa - to demonstrate how each in its own way calls up topoi that belong to different strands of adventure literature, gestures which help inscribe Seacole and Kingsley within or at least in relation to this tradition� I shall begin, however, by trying to explain why both writers’ texts are positioned precariously on the edge between adventure literature and (auto-) ethnography� Colonial Tales of Adventure If ‘adventure fiction’ does not seem a likely first pick of a genre that accommodates both Seacole’s and Kingsley’s works, this is not because their authors would have wanted to deny having written about their adventures� Seacole, after all, uses the term in her title and again in the heading of chapter xii (8)� She confesses to an “inclination to rove” (11), even a “longing to travel” (13), and recognises that her determination to get what she wants exposed her 324 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 to “some strange and amusing adventures” (11)� Only three pages into her narrative she describes, for the first time, an event - discussed below as my first example - that “very nearly brought to a premature conclusion” to what she calls “my life and adventures” (13)� Moreover, she states clearly that “my adventures had carried me to the battle-fields of the Crimea” (16) and uses the term five more times as her account unfolds. Kingsley, although she refrains from explicitly announcing her travels as an ‘adventure’ on the cover of her book and describes herself only once, and then indirectly, as “the adventurer” (TWA 631), also uses the term “adventure” a few times (166; 319; 344)� In addition, she refers to her and her African travel companions’ “misadventures” (72; 356). She also admits to a weakness for a specific sub-genre of adventure fiction 5 and might have been pleased, one feels entitled to speculate, that none other than National Geographic decided to publish Travels as part of its adventure-classics series� Neither would scholars who have worked on these two Victorian authors and their texts disagree that adventure is pivotal to each� Sandra Pouchet Paquet discusses how the mid-Victorian widow Seacole “carves out a new life for herself as an adventurer, an entrepreneur and professional healer” (652) and argues that her text “reflects an idealized self as heroic subject of the British Empire” (656), which testifies to “her love of adventure, her desire to perform heroic national service and to receive […] recognition” (ibid�)� Amy Robinson speaks of “the many roles she occupies in the course of her adventures” (542), Evelyn Hawthorne describes her as an “adventuring businesswoman” (309) who did not shrink from making “an open statement of her […] desire for adventure” (323)� Laura Moakler even grants her “a life filled with adventure” (371) and Angelia Poon speaks of her deliberately seeking out “fluid sites” - like Panama and the Crimea - that are simultaneously “carnivalesque space[s]” (506), while both Poon (506) and Sara Salih (“Gallant Heart” 176) evoke Pratt’s “contact zones” to describe Seacole’s appetite for locations that were in flux. Jessica Howell calls Seacole a “war-time heroine” (121), Pramod Nayar claims her as one of the black writers who “use travel as a means of constructing selfhood” (45), while Corry Staring-Derks, Jeroen Staring, and Elizabeth Anionwu speak of her “penchant for globetrotting” (514)� The situation is similar when it comes to the late-Victorian travelling spinster Mary Henrietta Kingsley� Kingsley-scholars have no problem with the label ‘adventure’ either� Birkett titles her biography Imperial Adventuress (1991), while Sara Mills finds 5 “My most favourite form of literature, I may remark, is accounts of mountaineering exploits […]�” ( TWA 213) Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 325 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 parallels between Kingsley and conventional “adventure heroes” (158), arguing that Travels both shares characteristics of “the adventure narrative” (164) and mocks them in return (ibid�)� This latter point is seconded by Karen Lawrence when she stresses that Kingsley “both used and transformed male models of adventure” (152)� Laura Ciolkowski claims “Kingsley’s adventures […] emerge in Travels in West Africa as the site of a series of female subject-making narratives” (340) and draws attention to the fact that Kingsley likes to dwell on her scientific failures, narrating them as “tales of ‘feminine’ adventures in science” (341), while her successes (the discovery of several formerly uncategorised species of fish) “go unmentioned” (ibid.). Lawrence, who refers to Kingsley as a “woman writer of adventure” (124), not only points out that Virago’s edition of Travels refers to her as “one of the most intrepid adventurers” (qtd� in Lawrence 127) but argues that Kingsley, “[i] nsofar as she identifies with the ethos of masculine adventure, […] appropriates conventions of adventure” (130)� In fact, Lawrence connects Kingsley to adventure in two further ways: to “the root meaning of ‘adventure’” (131) as ‘venture’ (risking money) and ‘future’ (French: l’avenir) on the one hand and to Kingsley’s “representing proper ethnography as movement and adventure” (141) on the other� There is little doubt, in other words, that the two Maries saw their exploits as adventures� Neither is it contested within the academic community that their books belong to adventure writing� Rather, Seacole’s and Kingsley’s texts sit a little uncomfortably inside the genre of ‘adventure fiction’ because of their claims to factuality. Both Seacole’s memoir and Kingsley’s travel account position themselves unequivocably on the authenticity-side of the blurry line between fiction and life-writing and draw on witnesses, letters, and cited authorities for their truth claims� But I would argue that there are four reasons why it is legitimate to discuss Wonderful Adventures as well as Travels in a volume of articles dedicated to adventure fiction. First, though both books are autobiographical, there can be little doubt that autobiography contains fictional elements, first and foremost embellishments� Brisson speaks of Kingsley’s borrowing from “secondary sources” (333), that is, other travel writers� Birkett, while discussing her “misreporting and exaggeration”, points out that she “interwove what she saw with the impressions drawn from earlier published accounts” (Adventuress 41) but also diagnoses that “Kingsley was becoming, in real life, a character in her own book” (76) and presented to her readers an “idealised image of West Africa and [a] hyped-up account of her experiences” (82)� That at least one of Kingsley’s contemporary readers, in fact her editor, confronted with what he called her “Logorrhea of Kingslese, combined with artistic and vividly coloured imagination”, wondered “whether I was intended to 326 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 believe” it all (Guillemard, qtd� in Birkett, Adventuress 42), seems to point in a similar direction� Second, although what Kingsley and Seacole write might be factual, what is not told cannot help distorting ‘the whole truth’ (whatever that may be), and both books contain great gaps, especially as far as their authors’ private selves are concerned� Pouchet Paquet calls Wonderful Adventures “a narrative of extraordinary silences and omissions” (657), referring mostly to the fact that Seacole’s life in Jamaica remains untold� Seacole compresses her marriage of eight years into seven lines and, as Nicole Fluhr has pointed out, she “remains silent about the biological daughter who appears to have accompanied Seacole to the Crimea” (96)� And while it is accurate that not telling ‘the whole truth’ does not suffice to make an account fictional, refusing to mention a daugher - when Seacole’s self-fashioning as a mother to the British soldiers in the Crimea is at the center of her claim to a nation’s gratitude - does have a warping effect� Third, both books demonstrate an acute awareness that identity is a question of performativity rather than ontology� Seacole plays many roles in Wonderful Adventures: that of the “skilful nurse and doctress” (16), that of “the yellow woman from Jamaica with the cholera medicine” (31), and, most importantly, that of the “motherly yellow woman” who offers “to go to the Crimea and nurse her ‘sons’ there” (72)� Rhonda Frederick has drawn attention to how Seacole “promotes herself as other than ‘other’ […], as a Creole woman” (493, italics in original)� Donghee Om argues that she, as “Mother Seacole” (16), unites “Victorian tropes of domesticity and race as performance”, which in effect “reinterprets blackness as a marker of cultural instead of racial heritage” (80)� Having thus established the “performativity of blackness” (95), Seacole then uses it to her own advantage� Kingsley not only shared the sense of identity as performance but exploited it even more successfully than Seacole did� Her parents’ death freed her from the obligations of their “Nurse and Dutiful Victorian Daughter” (Birkett, Adventuress xxiii), but she remained a “loyal sister” (Blunt, Travel 46) to her brother throughout, which was the only other mould Victorian society had at the ready for an unmarried woman� In addition, however, she discovered a whole series of roles she could occupy: as “coaster” (Kingsley, CCC 550), as a “naturalist” (Birkett, Adventuress 19) and a “fearless traveller” (Blunt, Travel 46), and - most surprisingly, perhaps, and as long as she “stayed away from other white people” - that of a “white man” (Birkett, Adventuress 49)� Not only does Kingsley make use for herself of the grammatical universal masculine, misunderstandings based on expectations of gender roles also lead to her being addressed, at least once in a letter, as Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 327 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 “old Man” (TWA 288) by a European who has not met her yet� 6 In the first few months after the publication of her “intrepid adventures amongst dangerous peoples in supernatural landscapes” (Birkett, Adventuress 43), Kingsley struggled to find her feet as a public speaker. Accordingly, she was known to ask obliging gentlemen to take the respective podium and read out, in her presence, the papers she had penned on her “ethnological bush-work” (Kingsley, “Fetish View” 151)� Eventually, however, she found her public voice and, in a process of rapid professionalisation, added to her roles as “African Explorer”, “Bestselling Travel Writer Representative of Her Britannic Majesty in Africa”, and “Imperialist” those of “Political Campaigner, Journalist”, and “Popular Lecturer” (Birkett, Adventuress xxiii)� Fourth, the use of literary tropes and genres adds an element of fictionalisation to both Wonderful Adventures and Travels� In Seacole’s case, this is already part of the scholarly discourse� As Cheryl Fish has demonstrated, Seacole draws on generic conventions of the slave narrative and, more importantly, of the travelogue, “a genre with episodic discourse that tends to blur the boundaries between truth and fiction” (479), and Frederick adds “the war memoir” (489) to Seacole’s immediate genre models� As far as Kingsley is concerned, Lila Marz Harper evokes the “caricature” as influential for the creation of her narrative persona (186), and Gérard Gâcon even refers to Kingsley herself as a “metaphor” (174)� By and large, however, Travels is not being discussed in relation to any other genre than that of travel writing, 7 although Robert Pearce has described Kingsley, anachronistically, as “alternately Wooster and Jeeves in the jungle” (187, qtd� in Kennedy 157)� But then, travel writing as such has always been precariously placed on the thin and eminently penetrable line between fact and fiction and has frequently been accused of unreliability. On top of this, it has been remarked upon that satire and parody are two of Kingsley’s favourite ways of positioning herself in relation to her male predecessors, fellow-authors, and models (Kennedy 153)� In the following, I am going to argue that the anecdote is a (persistently semi-literary) genre that plays a hitherto underestimated role in Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures and Kingsley’s Travels� 6 “I have given in to the temptation and am the third Englishman to ascend the Peak and the first to have ascended it from the south-east face. The first man to reach the summit was Sir Richard Burton” ( CCC 550)� This seems to indicate that to Kingsley it is more important to be able to put herself in a line with Burton than it is to claim her place as ‘first (white) woman’ to climb Mount Cameroon. 7 See, for example, Mills; Blunt, Travels; Ciolkowski� 328 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 Anecdotal Theory A form of short, self-contained narrative, the anecdote has been dismissed both as the “dime-story” (Gossman 152) and the “scrapheap” (Hénaff 97) of history� But it has also been cherished as a “dynamic” form of entertainment (Gross xi) and praised, when at its best, as “an art form” (xii)� The latter is a label that at least some of Seacole’s and Kingsley’s anecdotes rightly deserve� Scholars have ascribed to the anecdote the potential to act as “a levelling device” (van Manen 246), but they have also described it as “aporetic” (Fineman 62), “essentially disruptive and disorienting” (Loveless 29), awarded it the power to act as “counter-history” (Gossman 152), and invested it with epistemological sway� On this spectrum, most of the anecdotes delivered by the two Maries are on the supportive side, though one, the last to be analysed below, certainly has the subversive potential necessary to foster a counter-history� Often approached as the contrasting ‘other’ of history’s grands récits, understood as a petit fait social (165) - and thus a close relative to “fabliaux, riddles and jokes” (Hénaff 97) -, the anecdote is a small form of considerable reach� Both Seacole and Kingsley make the most of their petite histoire[s] (Fineman 61) by using them, for instance, to inscribe themselves humorously into the masculine genres of adventure writing and, at the same time, thereby changing the way adventure is written� Etymologically, anecdotes are ‘things unpublished’� 8 As (originally oral) reports of “striking, disturbing or perplexing event[s] or behaviour” (Gossman 168), anecdotes also have as long a history of association with the private, the secret, the “confidential and often scandalous” (Gross vii) as with “the unflattering close-up[]” (x), “the ludicrous or disreputable” (ibid.), the “interesting, original, odd or even exemplary” (Hénaff 98), the superficial, and the unreliable (“anecdote, n�”)� In cultural settings that privilege the public, the prolix, and the elaborate, this leads to characterisations of the anecdote, with its attention to detail, as of “the moment” (Galopp 3), as the “marginal” (7), as “circumstantial, trivial, unimportant” (Hénaff 97); as “too plain, too everyday, too vernacular, too low-bred, too mundane” (van Manen 232)� Especially within the Victorian sex-gender system, all of these are not infrequently associated with, and all too easily translated into, the feminine� In the context of academic discourse, the anecdote was decried for the longest time as “an impressionistic and naïve form of human science discourse” (van Manen 233) until, at the end of the 1980s, it began to fascinate scholars 8 The syllable an in Greek denotes negation, and ekdota are ‘published items’ (“anecdote, n�”)� Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 329 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 in the humanities� 9 It is not unreasonable to assume that this has something to do with the enhanced status bestowed on the anecdote by its link to microhistory (Levi 97), the “evidentiary paradigm” (Peltonen 45), and New Historicism (Hénaff 107, footnote 4 refers to all of Carlo Ginzburg’s major work)� And although Gossmann states that “scholars cannot even agree where there is anything definable” (147), attempts at definition of the anecdote’s “nature, form and function” (148) have, of course, been made� 10 That the anecdote, as a (literary) genre, is a ‘small form’ is not disputed� According to the OED, the word entered the English language in the mid-seventeenth century� Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary from 1785 gives it the updated meaning of “a biographical incident; a minute passage of private life” (152, my italics), which the first edition had not yet contained. Both Seacole’s and Kingsley’s anecdotes, especially the former’s, clearly form part of this tradition� As Gossman informs us, the term ‘anecdote’ “was widely used during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to designate a species of historical writing that deliberately eschewed large-scale ‘narrativization’” (150)� Steering clear of the grand récit, Seacole’s anecdotal accounts of camplife behind the front, as microhistories, supplement both W� H� Russell’s daily reporting for The Times and the retrospective historical accounts of the Crimean War� The description that Benjamin Disraeli - born a year before Seacole - offers of anecdotes, namely “minute notices of human nature and of human learning” (Fadiman, qtd� in van Manen 247, my italics), resonates with those of Kingsley’s anecdotes that are, at core, ethnographic accounts that shed light on both nineteenth-century African customs and their Victorian perceptions as well as Kingsley’s distance to the latter� More complex, because it can differ from case to case, is the anecdote’s relation to truth and factuality� Much depends on whether one agrees with Marcel Hénaff that “the anecdotal does not come under fiction but under fact” (98)� If one does not, then it is possible to claim for the anecdote what is true for other forms of literature: that simply because a text is fictional - and factual accuracy, therefore, is not the point -, it does not necessarily mean that it cannot contain or give rise to insights that are true, beyond and apart from factuality� If one does share Hénaff’s assessment, one has to embrace what he calls the anecdotal’s “dual relationship to the question of truth” and distinguish between “1) truth as it relates to what is verifiable” and “2) truth understood as a revelation of what was concealed and a manifestation 9 The most recent study that testifies to this persistent interest - Anecdotal Modernity: Making and Unmaking History, edited by Dorson et al� - was not yet available as my article was being prepared for typesetting� 10 Gossman’s footnote (148n10) offers an extensive list of works� 330 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 of something beyond mere appearance” (Hénaff 98)� This second, revelatory element refers to what I called above ‘true, beyond and apart from factuality’, a dimension that is fully available to literature� But whether what is told in an anecdote is invented or not, it is “always unverifiable” (Gossman 159, my italics)� More than that, it is in fact “fundamentally unverifiable” since “if it were verified, vetted, it would cease to be an anecdote” (Loveless 24, my italics)� Accordingly, John J� Gross opens up a whole spectrum: some anecdotes are “as accurate as an honest legal deposition”, while those at the other end “have been deliberately manufactured” and the ones in the middle “have been to a greater or lesser degree improved in the telling” (xii)� Since it is, by definition, impossible to know which is which, Loveless is right to stress that “[t]he anecdote is a slippery knowledge maker, its politics suspect” (24), as unverifiability infects the authority of first-hand witnessing. As is the case with most other anecdotes, Seacole’s and Kingsley’s are framed by gestures of truth-telling� This is very much part and parcel of the genre’s conventions, as the anecdote, according to Hénaff, is “always given as reporting something that actually happened” (97)� But because there is no way of telling if or to what extent they are made up, anecdotes are permanently suspended in the space between complete factuality, embellished fact, and complete invention� Both Seacole and Kingsley make strong truth claims� To a certain extent, the whole apparatus of testimony Seacole installs in Wonderful Adventures - starting with Russell’s Preface, enhanced by the series of letters written by grateful ex-patients up and down the ranks, and ending with a list of names of people who knew her well during their time in the Crimea - is meant to protect against accusations that her stories might be made up� In Kingsley’s case, as her biographer has stressed, “first-hand knowledge was the key to her professional qualification” (Birkett, Adventuress 92)� She founded her post-travel career as a public speaker about matters West African on the authority of “having been there” (Kingsley, qtd� in Birkett, Adventuress 115) and only speaking of “what I had seen” (101) and used this authority masterfully to delegitimise opponents in debates on African imperial policy� Interestingly, neither Seacole nor Kingsley seems worried that the necessarily precarious status of their anecdotes might inadvertently displace their whole accounts from fully authorised life-writing towards adventure fiction. The anecdote in general also has an intimate and complex relation with history� Ivo Kamp lists its possible functions as “a corrective of, or supplement to, existing historical narratives (164)� Gossmann agrees that anecdotes “have always stood in a close relation to the longer, more elaborate narratives of history”, either “in a supportive role” as “examples and illustrations” or “in a challenging role”, which is why he refers to them as “the repressed of Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 331 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 history” (143). This already implies that anecdotes - fictional or not - are a part of history, yet Gossman goes further in claiming that “the fictional anecdote serves an unequivocably historical function” (160)� Both Seacole’s and Kingsley’s books fill in some of history’s blanks and supply new perspectives that are repressed, or at least missing, in Victorian discourse on war and on travel in remote regions� In Kingsley’s case, the new perspective is that of the first white woman to travel the Congo (rather than work in one place as a missionary); in Seacole’s it is that of a mixed-race and middle-aged widow closely attached to the British Army during a military campaign� Scholars debate whether the anecdote is best understood as a “specific literary genre, with peculiar literary properties” (Fineman 50), which at the same time “exceeds its literary status” (56), as a “historeme, […] the smallest unit of the historiographic fact” (57, italics in original), or as “a methodological device” (van Manen 232)� In 1989 van Manen, coining a verb, claims that “to anecdote is to reflect, to think” and that “anecdotes form part of the grammar of everyday theorizing” (232)� In the same year, Joel Fineman puts forward his claim that the anecdote - as a “hole” in the “whole” of history - “is the literary form that uniquely lets history happen by virtue of the way it introduces an opening into the teleological, and therefore timeless, narration of beginning, middle, and end” (61, italics in original)� Having created this “opening of narrativity” (ibid�), however, the anecdote, about which “there is something […] that exceeds its literary status” (56), is then typically “plugged up by a teleological narration” (61) until “a further anecdotal operation” occurs (ibid�)� This is a looped process of “dilation and contraction” (ibid�) on which Jane Galopp, building on Fineman, later comments: “The logic here is circular; or rather, it is a knot” (86)� In her anecdotal theory, Galopp, steeped, like Fineman, in psychoanalysis and operating “at the intersection of deconstruction and feminism” (4), demonstrates that it is not only possible to “think through anecdote” (2) but rewarding to use the genre that is simultaneously small and excessive for what she calls “exorbitant theorizing” (7)� How radical a departure this is for scholarship, which used to despise the ‘merely’ anecdotal, is most clearly stated by van Manen as he reminds readers that anecdotes used to be considered of “low status in scholarly writings because […] they rest on dubious factual evidence” (2)� Although neither Mary Seacole nor Mary Kingsley are much given to what we would call ‘theorising’, I contend that at least two of the anecdotes I have chosen transcend the traditional divide - described by van Ryssen as that between the humorous / special/ trivial (on the side of the ‘short’ anecdote) and the serious / general/ overarching / grand (on the side of ‘grand’ theory)� And by doing so they make themselves available, precisely in the way that van Manen, Fineman and Gallop envisage, to 332 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 “fertilize theory-making” (van Ryssen 408) and help us think through larger issues at hand than the anecdotes’ surface first seems to imply. Anecdotal Adventures Three times in Wonderful Adventures does Mary Seacole use the word “anecdote / s” (95,133, 138) to describe elements of her own narrative, thus signalling that she is aware of the genre and also suggesting, perhaps, that she knows its rules and the readerly expectations it creates, such as an “anticipation about novelty” (Conley 7)� Mary Kingsley, by contrast, alludes to anecdotes only once and not even in the body of Travels but only in the introduction, where she refers to second-hand stories she is told en route to West Africa without actually re-telling them (TWA 9)� Although Kingsley, unlike Seacole, does not imply that anecdotes are important narrative vehicles in her book, Travels packs them even more densely than Wonderful Adventures� Most of the anecdotes Seacole relates fall into one or more of the following categories: biographical incidents that tend to be embarrassing due to Seacole’s naiveté, 11 disasters narrowly averted, 12 moments of (her or other people’s) bad luck, 13 demonstrations of wit� 14 The more generic (sometimes even anonymous) anecdotes in Wonderful Adventures tend to be memorable moments based on someone’s unusual reaction or great coincidence, either 11 For instance, when she spoils her “light-blue dress” ( TWA 20) during the ascent of a clayey river-bank in Panama or when - while she is trying to cut a figure in the French camp on the Tchernaya - the flour with which she had desperately tried to conceal the skin-disease of her only available horse comes off on her dark riding habit ( TWA 109)� Om reads the “artificial whitening of the grey mare” as a comment on “the ridiculousness of racial performance as well as an attempt to convert a burlesque performance of race into a burlesque performance on race” (92)� 12 Examples include her jumping into the water to retrieve a box of possessions that is being carried away by a flood and having to be dragged out ( TWA 97) or the time when, bringing provisions to the soldiers at the front, she comes “under fire”, is told to take cover, “and with a very undignified and unladylike haste […] had to embrace the earth, and remain there until the same voices would laughingly assure me that the danger was over” ( TWA 136)� 13 Trying to reclaim something of value from a Russian merchant in her debt, whom she finds absent from home, Seacole takes a raven as compensation but the bird is sat on within the hour by a soldier who had accompanied her on her errand ( TWA 163)� 14 The best example is Seacole’s “pointe”, a classical feature of the anecdote (Gossman 149), after having confessed “my prejudice against the Yankees” ( TWA 154) - whose racism upsets her throughout Wonderous Adventures - to a polite and friendly French Prince� She amuses him by retorting to his reminder that he is proud of his partly American ancestry: “I should never have guessed it, Prince! ” (ibid�)� Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 333 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 in the comic 15 or the tragic register� 16 Those belonging to the first two types have an effect that has been described as “self-deflation” (Fish 489), or they are perceived as “self-deprecating” (Om 91) as they sometimes come “at the expense of her [Seacole’s] own dignity” (ibid�)� Illustrating beautifully that anecdotes are “social products” (van Manen 243) and an “essentially popular or communal creation” (Gossman 159), many of the tales related in Wonderful Adventures lead to the intradiegetic audience’s expression of mirth (WA 64, 104, 105, 106, 109, 136, 143, 158)� One could argue that the humour in Seacole’s historical anecdotes functions as “a corrective of, or supplement to, existing historical narratives” (Kamps 164), in this case the dire accounts - journalistic or otherwise - of the Crimean war� Seacole explicitly voices her expectation that her readers will join her in “laughing heartily” (WA 24)� This runs counter to Jane Robinson’s verdict that Seacole’s book as a whole is “a glorious advertisement” for its author (Black Nurse 173) or to Howell’s even more critical assessment that “Seacole’s main goal is self-glorification” (122). In fact, presenting herself as someone able to laugh at herself and willing to be laughed at by others is an effective strategy to prevent the audience - whom Seacole is, after all, courting - from resenting her proud celebration of her own good qualities� Framed by an overarching narrative that announces its content as Wonderful Adventures from the start, not all of Seacole’s anecdotes are in themselves adventurous or, for that matter, wonderful� In fact, many of them are rather run-of-the-mill� The two I have chosen as objects of analysis draw on classical topoi of adventure literature and, moreover, share the feature of the double twist, which needs to be seen as a direct product of the anecdote’s “strikingly dramatic three-act structure” (Gossman 149)� The double-twist in both examples invites readers to have two successive laughs: one after the exposition has led to a crisis and the other after the crisis has been resolved or re-framed� Seacole, who reports to have been called (unflatteringly, in her view) “quite a female Ulysses” (WA 11) by her contemporaries, has also been characterised by late twentieth-century scholars as a “‘yellow’ picara” (Fish 486)� That my first example, the hen-coop anecdote, plays with two classical topoi of the heroic as well as the picaresque - the shipwreck and the heroine’s practical cleverness - is thus quite typical of Seacole’s book� I shall be arguing, however, that this anecdote also departs from the conventions that govern picaresque 15 One example is the English soldier who - having been mercilessly taunted by a French ally about the British army’s recent defeat before Sebastopol - happily retaliates with a reference to Waterloo ( TWA 158)� 16 For instance, the two British sergeants who used to be schoolmates, had lost contact, meet again in the trenches, and are killed by the same Russian bullet ( TWA 133)� 334 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 adventure fiction with respect to both topoi� On her way home to Jamaica from her second visit to London, a fire breaks out on board: I dare say it would have resisted all the crew’s efforts to put it out, had not another ship appeared in sight; upon which the fire quietly allowed itself to be extinguished. Although considerably alarmed, I did not lose my senses; but during the time when the contest between fire and water was doubtful, I entered into an amicable arrangement with the ship’s cook, whereby, in consideration of two pounds, which I was not, however, to pay until the crisis arrived - he agreed to lash me on to a large hen-coop� (WA 13-14) Shipwrecks are no rare occurrence in the context of the heroic, both in the Homeric tradition and in the picaresque, but in Wonderful Adventures such a catastrophe does not actually occur� Instead, the narrated self narrowly avoids disaster, and the near-miss is subsequently exploited by the narrating self for comic delivery (“the fire […] allowed itself to be extinguished”). As a heroine, Seacole displays a typical, Roxana-like coolness (“I did not lose my senses”), a way with people, and an ever-open eye for money (“amicable arrangement”; “not […] to pay until the crisis arrived”), all classical features of the picara as a stock character� Yet, her initially smart-sounding idea to use a floating object to save herself from drowning - perhaps in imitation of Ishmael on Queequeg’s waterproof coffin at the end of Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) - might, quite literally, not have held up� Since the shipwreck does not happen, Seacole is never “lashed” to the coop� But, had she been tied to a cage big enough to support her weight, even a small wave could have flipped her over, in which case the coop that was meant to lift her out of the water would have held her under� In staging an almost-but-not-quite shipwreck that displaces the heroic into the comic, and by displaying a near-cleverness that contrasts with true Ulyssean brilliance, Seacole’s hen-coop anecdote draws on two registers of maritime adventure with a difference� In doing so, it facilitates the white British reading public’s acceptance of Seacole� I am not making the claim that she consciously evokes these literary intertexts with her hencoop-anecdote; even less am I suggesting that she made it up to be able to evoke them� But her inclusion of this anecdote into her memoir makes it possible for her audience to believe that she shares their literary canon of adventure fiction as part of the British cultural imaginary. The fact that this happens in an unthreatening manner offers her white audience a sense-making perspective that can conceive of a Creole woman as a full British subject� My second example from Seacole needs to be read against the history of the nineteenth-century gold rush, which inspired people by the tens of thousands to leave behind whatever they had and take up an unconventional life with- Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 335 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 out comforts in the hopes of making their fortunes� Given that, it is, perhaps, unsurprising that the gold rush gave rise to its own subgenre of adventure fiction. Early in 1850, during its first wave, Seacole’s brother Edward Grant left Kingston for Panama to make some money on “the great high-road to and from golden Canada” (WA 17)� After her husband’s death, Seacole joined her brother on the isthmus where the Fort Bowen Gold and Silver Mining Company was beginning to exploit the land’s natural resources� During her time in Panama, Seacole came into contact with miners and individual prospectors� I often used to watch them at their work; and would sometimes wander about by myself, thinking it possible that I might tumble across some gold in my rambles� And I once did come upon some heavy yellow material, that brought my heart into my mouth with that strange thrilling delight which all who have hunted for the precious metal understand so well� I think it was very wrong; but I kept the secret of the place from the alcalde [the mayor] and every one [sic! ] else, and filled some bottle with the precious dust, to carry down to Navy Bay� I did not go for some time; but when I did, one of my first visits was to a gold-buyer; and you can imagine my feelings when he coolly laughed, and told me it was some material (I forget its name) very like gold but - valueless� The worst part of it was that, in my annoyance and shame, I threw all I had away, and among it some which I had reason to believe subsequently was genuine� (WA 64) Four more topoi of the picaresque tradition of adventure are activated in the gold anecdote: the heroine’s peripatetic life style (“wander”, “rambles”), the lucky find (“tumble across”, “did come upon”), the enjoyment of personal good fortune overruling moral concerns (“it was very wrong; but”), and the outwitting of others (“kept the secret […] from the alcalde and every one else”)� Yet, as was the case with the hencoop example discussed above, these topoi only provide the anecdote with its point of departure. A first twist takes Seacole, with the realisation of her own ignorance (“coolly laughed”), to disappointment (“annoyance”, “shame”) at having mistaken yellow mica for gold� The second twist moves her even further down this road when she retrospectively realises that she might have thrown away genuine gold because she had been trusting enough to believe the gold-buyer when she should have questioned his judgment and / or motive for declaring her dust “valueless”� According to Clifton Fadiman, “[b]iographers and historians value anecdotes for their power to reveal the true character of persons or times which are hard to capture in any other manner” (xxi)� Seacole, again as part of the endeavour to charm her audience, expertly uses this genre characteristic� On the one hand, she captures the phenomenon ‘gold rush’ as a time and place where one cannot trust anyone� On the other hand - and this, I would claim, is the 336 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 gold anecdote’s “sense-making perspective” (Loveless 26) -, she exploits the anecdote’s generic ability to carry“symbolic value” (Gossmann 157)� In doing so, she stages herself as someone not only easily troubled even by minor breaches of honourable behaviour but also - due to her “love to be of service” and her desire to lead a life of “usefulness” (WA 32) - as someone unfit for this type of adventurer’s life� In a nutshell, in the hen-coop anecdote, the double twist’s first laugh acknowledges Seacole’s un-Ulyssean would-be cleverness, the second is a product of relief, as it could have cost her her life but, due to the unheroic almost-shipwreck, it did not come to that� The laugh in reaction to the gold-anecdote’s first twist is a reaction to Seacole’s naiveté and the second a reaction to this naiveté’s turning out to be even greater than previously exposed� Mary Kingsley’s Travels is not only more than twice the length of Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures, it also contains far more anecdotes, most of them funny� A few of them are told to Kingsley by others and repeated by her, 17 but in most of them she stars personally� If it is true that “Kingsley invented her narrating scientific persona as ‘caricature,’ as ‘a caricature she formed for her own purposes’” (Harper 186), then the anecdote plays a pivotal role in this construction� There are anecdotes in Travels that poke fun at Kingsley’s clumsiness, which surprises 18 and / or entertains 19 the Africans she meets, others that emphasise how she escapes a potentially lethal situation through luck 20 or pluck, 21 some in which her shrewdness or insight into the psychology of others is being showcased, 22 others in which she reacts with remarkable 17 A good example of this is the tragic anecdote of the young agent newly arrived in Africa who is shocked back to Europe by finding his predecessor’s corpse being consumed by “a considerable quantity of rats. And most of the flies in West Africa” (Kingsley, TWA 53)� 18 An example would be Kingsley’s literal “dropping in” through the roof of a hut ( CCC 134)� 19 One anecdote describes how some African villagers gather in anticipation, “seeing we were becoming amusing again” ( TWA 90), and are rewarded by Kingsley’s sliding, head-first, off a rock and landing in a shrub. At another occasion, her teaching herself how to steer a canoe first has some French missionaries and their African charges fear for her life and then in stitches ( TWA 111-113)� 20 The most famous example is probably when Kingsley falls into an elephant trap and, thanks to “the blessing of a good thick skirt” ( TWA 167), is caught on the sharpened poles rather than impaled� 21 The account that begins “I never hurt a leopard intentionally” ( TWA 319) ends with Kingsley’s scaring off the wild cat which had attacked a village dog by throwing a wellaimed jug that hits it right between the eyes� 22 For instance, when Kingsley insists that her translator tell a proud chief that she had heard his village was known as a “thief town” ( TWA 176-77) but was willing to suspend judgment until she had formed her own opinion� Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 337 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 sang-froid, 23 and again others that are built around a misunderstanding� 24 The first of Kingsley’s anecdotes I have chosen for analysis belongs to the category ‘saved by luck or pluck’. It is taken from “Voyage Down Coast”, chapter five of Travels, and tells of Kingsley’s adventure in a tidal mangrove swamp where her small dug-out canoe has been trapped by the receding waters� If you are a mere ordinary person of a retiring nature, like me, you stop in your lagoon until the tide rises again; most of your attention is directed to dealing with an ‘at home’ to crocodiles and mangrove flies, and with the fearful stench of the slime around you� What little time you have over you will employ in wondering why you came to West Africa, and why, after having reached this point of absurdity, you need have gone and painted the lily and adorned the rose, by being such a colossal ass as to come fooling about in mangrove swamps� Twice this chatty little incident, as Lady MacDonald would call it, has happened to me, but never again if I can help it� On one occasion, the last, a mighty Silurian, as The Daily Telegraph would call him, chose to get his front paws over the stern of my canoe, and endeavoured to improve our acquaintance� I had to retire to the bows, to keep the balance right, and fetch him a clip on the snout with a paddle, when he withdrew, and I paddled to the very middle of the lagoon, hoping the water there was too deep for him or any of his friends to repeat the performance� Presumably it was, for no one did it again� I should think that crocodile was eight feet long; but don’t go and say I measured him, or that this is my outside measurement for crocodiles� I have measured them when they have been killed by other people, fifteen, eighteen, and twenty-one feet odd� This was just a pushing young creature who had not learnt manners� (CCC 89) By combining heroic deed with anti-heroic description, by evoking the ideal of Victorian femininity and then removing one of its supporting pillars (passivity / helplessness), and by insisting, in unusual circumstances, on the importance of a stiff upper lip and manners, this anecdote stages an irresistibly funny scene of considerable theatricality, which “tells something particular while really addressing the general or the universal” (van Manen 246)� Animals described as humans (“no one”) are its principal actors - the crocodile, who makes such a dramatic entry, is helped to a comic exit and gives an ex- 23 For example, when Kingsley, hosted for the night by a Fan village, finds a tied bag suspended inside her hut, opens it, curiously tips the contents into her hat and, finding human toes, eyes, ears, and a hand, laconically comments “the hand was fresh, the others only so so, and shrivelled” ( TWA 170)� 24 The lack of grammatical gender in many African languages (and the Victorian presumption that a traveler in Africa would be male) inspire an agent, who has heard of a European’s arrival, to write: “Dear Old Man, you must be in a deuce of a mess after the tornado� Just help yourself to a set of my dry things […] and then come over here” ( TWA 288)� 338 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 ample to “his friends”, who decide not “to repeat the performance” - while Kingsley, with gusto, delivers her own supporting role in this scene as ‘lady out of place’� Several interesting devices are at work here� By employing the second person, the narrating self invites her readers’ identification with the narrated self. Despite it being quite clear that Kingsley is anything but “a mere ordinary person”, she then confirms the common ground (which her use of ‘you’ asserts) by adding, in an ethos-building gesture, “like me”� A metaphor follows comparing the swamped canoe, visited by “mangrove flies and crocodiles” that “endeavour[] to improve our acquaintance”, to a drawing room in which one is “at home” to callers� By anthropomorphising animals that are most likely to inspire annoyance, disgust, or fear, Kingsley, building further on her invitation to readers to identify, offers a conceit that comments critically on London society’s pestering blood-suckers and poikilotherms but also on “what little time you have over” as a lady once everybody has been attended to� Next, the narrating self expands the circle of the allegedly like-minded by suggesting that “Lady MacDonald” - wife to the first Commissioner and Consul General of the Niger Coast Protectorate (Birkett, Adventuress 27) - would concur that “this chatty little incident” was, if mildly amusing, perfectly common-place� Yet, the whole assumption that heroine, reader, and the incarnation of colonial society all share the same euphemistic assessment of this scene is ironically undercut because Kingsley’s narrating self is well aware that hardly any Victorian lady’s life-choices ever brought her nose-tosnout with a crocodile� In the Silurian anecdote, humour derives both from what happens and from how it is told� Obviously, things are going wrong: not only is Kingsley stuck in an unwholesome environment, and not only will this situation continue for hours until the tide frees her� As Kingsley, the narrator, reproaches Kingsley, the heroine, she builds pathos by drawing on one of her audience’s possible opinions of her journey in general, this adventure in particular, and her person especially (West Africa? ! Why? Mangrove swamp? Avoid� Crocodiles? How frightful! Kingsley? Fool�)� Even worse: as the narrating self lets on, this is happening for the second time� She should have known better and the fact that she got it wrong again prompts her to paint herself as “a colossal ass”, thus momentarily denying herself the status as a human and - due to her use of slang - as a lady� This judgment of herself as someone who blunders because she goes far beyond what is called for also finds expression in her idiosyncratic addition to an established idiom� According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘to paint (or to guild) the lily’ means “to embellish excessively, to add ornament where none is needed” (“lily, n� and adj�”)� While others prone Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 339 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 to hyperbole stop there, Kingsley keeps going� While the transitive ‘to adorn’ means “to provide with an ornament or ornaments; to decorate or embellish (with something)” (“adorn, v�”, my italics), ‘adorning the rose’ is not idiomatic� Yet the newly coined phrase - since it adds further to what is already considered excessive - is not the worst metaphor for what Kingsley does in general by narrating her two voyages� Some of the Silurian anecdote’s power comes from Kingsley’s subtle use of a topos of adventure to which she gives a comic twist by switching the hero’s gender in her rendition of the mytheme ‘knight slaying the dragon’: paddle instead of lance, clip instead of goring, stand-off instead of domination, “pushing young creature” instead of an emblem of sin, teaching “manners” instead of destruction (all the dead and measured crocodiles “have been killed by other people”), a lesson (for Kingsley as much as for the crocodile) instead of death� Yet, this parody of a heroic stock scene does not, and therein lies the genius of this anecdote, come at the cost of losing the association with individual courage� Even though the heroic and the anti-heroic are inextricably linked here, and even though Kingsley draws on her talent for outrageous understatement throughout, the Silurian anecdote still conveys a sense of remarkable nerve� As a genre, anecdote has a connection to myth (Gossmann 159), and evoking the myth of St George in this particular example ensures, not just for a Victorian audience, that the individual courage Kingsley’s narrated self displays comes with nationalist overtones� Kingsley’s use of “slang vocabulary” and her generally “racy style” (Birkett, Adventuress 82), which attracted some contemporaries’ criticism 25 while making her “vivid, entertaining and evocative” prose famous (xxiv), can both be seen to advantage in the Silurian anecdote. Yet for the delivery of her climax, Kingsley - quite fittingly for a scene that borrows ironically from the heroic âventiure - chooses metre� At the same time, the type of metre for which she opts also subverts or rebels against the evoked genre’s rules since Kingsley does not go for iambic heroic couplets in her supreme moment of oratio vincta - “and fetch him a clip on the snout with a paddle” - but arranges three perfect dactyls that are ushered in by an anacrusis and followed by a trochee� Again, if on the syntactic level this time, this is a not a bad pars pro toto to stand in for Kingsley’s employment of the anecdote in her overall narrative strategy� Perhaps Birkett is right in surmising that Kingsley made people laugh “to counter future criticism” (Adventuress 19)� Both comical self-reproach and 25 An anonymous review in the Dial from 16 th March 1897 judged Travels to be “marred by course flippancy and jocular smartness of a low masculine type” (cited in Birkett, Adventuress 82)� 340 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 anticipating a critical audience’s possible reaction would fit this impulse to protect herself� In any case, tensions between conventions of genre, gender, and style are responsible for a number of comic effects in the Silurian anecdote, which can only unfold its potential because Kingsley, the adventurer, survived the encounter so that Kingsley, the narrator, could tell the tale� Were one to position the four anecdotes analysed here on a spectrum between “raw, unpolished” and “already been worked over and made into literature” (Gossman 163), Seacole’s hen-coop would be closest to the former end, followed by her gold anecdote and Kingsley’s encounter with the Silurian� My fourth and final anecdotal example is closest to what one might call ‘the literary’ end of the spectrum, although its oral pedigree seems still intact and there is no indication that it was lifted from a collection� It also has the strongest claim to being used as a “methodological device” used by the text as a whole “to reflect, to think” (van Manen 232). Even though “[b]orrowed” (Gossman 163) anecdotes are rather rare in Kingsley’s Travels, my last specimen, taken from chapter XII on “Fetish”, belongs to this type. It plays out against the background of a specific topos of colonial adventure, namely ‘hunting for big game’� In contrast to Baroness Blixen a generation later, Kingsley - perhaps for class-related reasons as much as due to personal aversion - never mentions having herself been a member of a shooting party� It is therefore both unsurprising and in line with her general attitude to animals that the only hunting anecdote she offers is second-hand: I heard an account the other day of a representative of Her Majesty in Africa who went out for a day’s antelope shooting� There were plenty of antelope about, and he stalked them with great care; but always, just before he got within shot of the game, they saw something and bolted� Knowing he and the boy behind him had been making no sound and could not have been seen, he stalked on, but always with the same result; until happening to look round, he saw the boy behind him was supporting the dignity of the Empire at large, and this representative of it in particular, by steadfastly holding aloft the consular flag. Well, if you go hunting the African idea with the flag of your own religion or opinions floating ostentatiously over you, you will similarly get a very poor bag� (Kingsley, TWA 235) As mentioned above, among the anecdotes in Travels, this hunting scene is unusual because Kingsley herself does not feature in it� It is less uncommon that she draws an explicit moral from the tale� The anecdote proper (what happens) and Kingsley’s narration (how it is told) should be discussed separately, and I shall start with the latter� In her function as narrator, Kingsley opens the narrative frame with the generic formula “I heard an account the other day”� This serves three functions: Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 341 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 it signals that this anecdote is an (at least) twice-told tale; it suggests that it is not authorised by Kingsley in quite the same manner as the anecdotes based on events she experienced herself; and it keeps Kingsley’s source in the dark� Kingsley closes the narrative frame by offering, in a metaphor that compares the failure of two colonial practices, her own interpretation� Hunting for exotic animals (which Kingsley herself does not practice) is like hunting for “the African idea” (which she does)� And their tertium comparationis, a “very poor bag” - that is, a meagre yield to the respective endeavour -, is only to be expected if hunters (of one or the other) go about their business in a fundamentally flawed manner. In the case of the unsuccessful stalking of game, it is the “consular flag”, presumably fluttering in the wind, that disperses the antelope� In the case of unsuccessful ethnographical research, it is “the flag of your own religion or opinions”, displayed in a manner perceived as dominating, superior, perhaps frightening, that chases away informants who might otherwise provide insights into African customs, beliefs, practices etc� for which the somewhat obscure ‘idea’ seems to stand� That the anecdote’s protagonists are kept anonymous helps to prepare this secondary reading, since depersonalising leads to abstraction, which in turn makes it easier to see how a concrete event that happened to specific individuals can stand in for a general and much bigger problem of colonial hierarchies. While the real flag is “held steadfastly aloft” and the metaphorical one is “floating ostentatiously”, both are symptoms of the tension between colonisation and successful communication� Kingsley’s metaphor suggests that success in ethnography (the parallel to shooting and killing antelope in game-hunting) would be to learn first-hand from Africans about themselves and their cultures� But matters are more complicated because in the anecdote proper there are not just a European hunter (who stands for the ethnographer), his flag (which represents European religion / opinions), and the antelope (which stands for “the African idea”) since - in addition to these - the anecdote proper also sports an African� For the boy, however, there is no structural equivalent in Kingsley’s metaphorical reading� This is not the anecdote’s fault, of course� Instead, failing to provide a complement for the boy in her metaphor is all the more remarkable because it erases from Kingsley’s own interpretation exactly what she prides herself on delivering to her reading public in general - a consideration of the African point of view - and thus points to a true blind spot of the ‘telling’ rather than the ‘told’� While the protagonists of the hunting anecdote are anonymous, they are still marked by function and ethnicity, which suggests their relation to each other� It is clear that “a representative of Her Majesty in Africa” - one of many, the indefinite article suggests, to whom this could have happened - is white. 342 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 It is also implied that the servant he brings with him on this adventure is not� “[B]oy” could be a marker of racist discourse’s refusal to acknowledge that a male African servant could be a full adult, or it could simply denote young age as well as male sex. In the first case, it is impossible for the “boy” to be white; in the second, it is highly unlikely that a white child or youth would join an unrelated Victorian colonial official on a hunting expedition on his own� It is equally clear that, in the context of colonialism, the two characters occupy two very different positions and that their relationship is structured by several hierarchies� The imperialist framework is also suggested by the fact that the boy is always “behind” the man, signifying his supportive capacity� These hierarchies of age (man / boy), race (white / black), social position (colonial employer/ colonised servant), and function (hunter/ assistant) are further underlined by the fact that the anecdote’s opening half, in its use of pronouns, suggests that the white man is alone (“he stalked”, “he got within shot”, “knowing he”, my italics), which has the effect of (falsely) establishing him as the undisputed protagonist. That the word “boy”, first used at the end of line four, sits at the anecdote’s exact centre - preceded and followed by 56 words (from “I” to “the” and from “behind” to “flag”) - might seem like a weak argument for claiming him the true hero of the tale, since it depends on excluding Kingsley’s comment from the anecdote proper� But even if exact symmetry is discarded as a stylistic device that might suggest the boy’s importance also on the semantic level, his first mention is without a doubt the turning point. Here, the explanation for the anecdote’s enigmatic first half (why do the antelope flee? ) begins to unfold - not, however, without introducing new mysteries� Everything, in this adventure gone awry, hinges on the questions ‘who sees what? ’ and ‘why? ’. The colonial official understands that the antelope see “something” that makes them run� Although uncertain of what they “saw”, he knows that “he and the boy […] could not have been seen”, presumably because they are crouching in high grass� When he decides to “look round”, he “sees” the flag and understands what scared the animals. Yet, a few things remain ambiguous to the end� And this is the point at which reading this anecdote, I contend, profits from the fundamental shift practiced by Jane Galopp and described by Nathalie Loveless, since anecdotal theory “offers a displacement from a practice of reading for the known (answers) to a reading that takes as its charge the mark of the unknown (that is, one that is drawn towards the interesting questions)” (Loveless 35). In the specific case of the game-hunting anecdote, the interesting questions are: Why does the boy hold up the flag? What can his act imply? Who is the story’s source? And what are the implications of the two possible answers to that third question? Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 343 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 At first glance, the anecdote seems to narrate the moment of a ‘cultural misunderstanding’� This is based on the assumption that the boy holds up the flag because he thinks it his duty and believes to be serving his colonial master (whose culture does betray a penchant for flags, after all) by announcing his status at all times� This reading is informed by the interpretation of the boy’s action that forms part of the anecdote (“supporting the dignity of the Empire at large, and this representative of it in particular”) and that could be the official’s, or that of the person who told the anecdote to Kingsley, or Kingsley’s own� If the anecdote tells a tale of ‘cultural misunderstanding’, two different answers to the question about the act’s implications present themselves� 1) That, in the eyes of the colonised, the colonisers do so many absurd things (i� e� seemingly putting value where clearly there is none or causing harm without need) that flying a flag during a hunt does not seem especially puzzling or silly� 2) Since status is equally important in African and European societies, the boy understands that the consular flag signifies his master’s status and that his only mistake is to assume (incorrectly) that the official would rather have his status announced to the natural world (i� e� without an audience that counts) than hunt successfully� It is also possible, however, to read this anecdote as a story about an act of ‘deliberate resistance’. After all, the boy could have held up the flag with the clear intention of scaring the antelope away, in an attempt to sabotage the official’s hunt and thus, ultimately, to thwart the mighty colonial master. If this were the case, a completely different implication would present itself, namely that the boy could not have picked a better tool for his act of rebellion against the Empire’s agent. The ingenious element in choosing the flag is that the very instrument of insurgence itself will most likely protect the culprit� After all, punishing a colonial subject for flying the British consul’s flag would mean admitting that there are things more important than representing “Her Majesty in Africa”� In fact, conceding that there might be situations in which “supporting the dignity of the Empire at large, and this representative of it in particular” is not the first priority would run counter to imperialism’s grand récit altogether� According to van Manen, an anecdote can be used as a methodological device “to describe something indirectly when this phenomenon resists direct description” (243)� Above, I also touched upon the point that the anecdote, as a genre, is by definition ineluctably unverifiable. To end my analysis, I would now like to connect these two points in order to try and further think through the game hunting anecdote as a story about colonial relations of power. Kingsley’s re-told tale stages unverifiability on the level of histoire in a scene that permanently suspends the attempt to determine whether the 344 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 boy’s action is deliberately subversive or not� This is mirrored on the level of discours since it is equally impossible to tell where the origin of this story lies� Ultimately, there are only two possible sources of origin for the game-hunting anecdote: the British official and the African servant. For several reasons it seems unlikely that the anecdote originates with the latter� Had his act been based on a ‘cultural misunderstanding’, that is, unintentionally disruptive, the story would make him look, at best, lacking in experience or judgment and, at worst, stupid� Neither implicit self-characterisation seems plausible as a motivation for narrativising the event and sharing the anecdote� Had it been a deliberate moment of sabotage, the very énonciation would take away the boy’s brilliant protection against retaliation since using the consular flag as the tool of subversion can only shield him from punishment as long as intentionality is deniable� If the colonial official were the anecdote’s origin, his willingness to put himself at the butt-end of a joke would testify to a sense of humour� Especially since he does not only report himself outwitted as far as histoire is concerned but also with respect to discours. He is, after all, first being put into a position from which he cannot very well punish the boy for frustrating his personal huntsman’s ambition without undermining the ideology that underpins the imperial project (British dignity and its representation is paramount); and he is, then, coaxed by the story’s sheer irresistibility to become the teller of a tale that has him outsmarted by someone he considers his inferior in every sense� This justifies, I think, invoking Fineman’s point that the anecdote has the power to “introduce[] an opening into the teleological […] narration of beginning, middle, and end” (61) and prompts my claim that Kingsley’s hunting anecdote is a paradigmatic “hole” in the “whole” (ibid�) of the logic that underlies imperialism� The event’s “rooted[ness] in the real” (57) is too strongly tied to the colonial imaginary for the story not to be narrativised within the symbolic� At the same time, the anecdote’s beginning (the mystery of the fleeing antelope), middle (the discovered flag-flying), and end (Kingsley’s metaphorical reading) cannot contain its semiosis, which boils over the brim, undermining any notion of British racial superiority to justify colonial exploitation� This has implications for Kingsley’s metaphorical reading of the game-hunting anecdote, which she reads as a story with strong parallels to her own position as a self-proclaimed ethnographer, since her blind spot - which points, I think, to her own racist beliefs - testifies further to the anecdote’s uncontainable nature as well as its epistemological reach� Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 345 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 Conclusion Perhaps none of the anecdotes in Wonderful Adventures and only a few of those in Travels are outrageous enough to qualify individually as ‘tall tales’� But the cumulative effect of narrating their adventures anecdotally takes Seacole and Kingsley, who were each in their own right travelling by choice as “an unprotected female” (WA 40), well off the beaten track also in terms of their narrative projects� That Seacole struck out for various frontier locations before making for a war zone and that Kingsley headed straight for African territory unchartered by Europeans adds to their humorous anecdotal adventures’ ‘talling’ effect� I illustrated which topoi of different strands of adventure literature and which genre characteristics of the anecdote the two Maries activate and to what effect� I further hope to have shown that the “ethnographic gaze” (Hawthorne 316) which Hawthorne grants to Seacole is not only shared by Kingsley but that both writers’ anecdotes also have strong “auto-ethnographic dimensions” (Pratt, “Arts” 35)� While Om might be right in claiming that Seacole’s account is more a figuration of exceptionality than of transgression (78), analysis of her anecdotes lends weight to Hawthorne’s claim that the combination of humour and hubris “creates a unique voice that disrupts the ‘master narratives’ of both the literary and imperial authority systems” (315-316)� While there is no denying that Kingsley had no interest in bringing down British colonial rule in Africa and thought it justified by racist theories, at least one of her anecdotes rather undermines these theories by pointing to some of Kingsley’s own blind spots� Both Wonderful Adventures and Travels in West Africa are replete with anecdotes, most of which are (flatly) humorous accounts of specific and sometimes trivial events (van Rhyssen 408). Yet some have seriously subversive potential, as we have seen, that has to do with the anecdote’s generic unverifiability, its hybrid nature as both literary and rooted in the real, and its ability to be used as a device for reflecting upon much larger discursive formations� Works Cited “adorn, v�” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP , 2020, www�oed�com/ view/ Entry/ 2705� Accessed 25 Sept� 2020� Alexander, Ziggi, and Audrey Dewjee� “Mary Seacole�” History Today, vol� 31, no� 9, 1981, p� 45� “anecdote, n�” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, 2020, www�oed�com/ view/ Entry/ 7367� Accessed 25 Sept� 2020� 346 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 “A Stir for Seacole�” Punch, vol� 31, 6 Dec� 1856, p� 221� https: / / archive� org / details / punchvol104a105lemouoft/ page / n309 / mode / 2up� Accessed 25 Sept� 2020� Birkett, Dea� “Kingsley, Mary Henrietta (1862-1900)�” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2008, https: / / doi-org�uaccess�univie�ac�at/ 10�1093/ ref: odnb/ 15 620� Accessed 25 Sept� 2020� ---� Mary Kingsley: Imperial Adventuress� Houndmills: Macmillan Academic and Professional Ltd�, 1992� Blunt, Alison� “Mapping Authorship and Authority: Reading Mary Kingsley’s Landscape Descriptions�” Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, edited by Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose� New York: Guilford Press, 1994, pp� 51-72� ---� Travel, Gender and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa. New York/ London: The Guilford Press, 1994� Brisson, Ulrike� “Fish and Fetish: Mary Kingsley’s Studies of Fetish in West Africa�” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol� 35, no� 3, 2005, pp� 326-340� Chang, Tan-Feng� “Creolizing the White Woman’s Burden: Mary Seacole Playing ‘Mother’ at the Colonial Crossroads between Panama and Crimea�” College Literature, vol� 44, no� 4, 2017, pp� 527-557� Ciolkowski, Laura E� “Travelers’ Tales: Empire, Victorian Travel, and the Spectacle of English Womanhood in Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa�” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol� 26, no� 2, 1998, pp� 337-366� Conley, Tom� “From Antidote to Anecdote: Montaigne on Dissemblance�” SubStance, vol� 38, no� 1 / 118, 2009, pp� 5-15� Dorson, James, et al�, editors� Anecdotal Modernity: Making and Unmaking History� Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020� Fadiman, Clifton, editor� The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes� New York: Little, Brown & Co�, 1985� Fineman, Joel� “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction�” The New Historicism, edited by H� Aram Veeser� 1989� London: Routledge, 2013, pp� 49-76� Fish, Cheryl. “Voices of Restless (Dis-)Continuity: The Significance of Travel for Free Black Women in Antebellum America�” Women’s Studies, vol� 26, 1997, pp� 475-495� Fluhr, Nicole� “‘Their Calling Me “Mother” Was Not, I Think, Altogether Unmeaning’: Mary Seacole’s Maternal Personae�” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol� 34, 2006, pp� 95-113� Frederick, Rhonda� “Creole Performance in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands�” Gender & History, vol� 15, no� 3, 2003, pp� 487-506� Gâcon, Gérard� “The Mangrove Deciphered: Mary Kingsley and West Africa�” In-between Two Worlds: Narratives by Female Explorers and Travellers 1850-1945, edited by Béatrice Bijon and Gérard Gâcon� New York: Peter Lang, 2009, pp� 167-176� Galopp, Jane� Anecdotal Theory� Durham: Duke UP , 2002� Gikandi, Simon� Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism� New York: Columbia UP , 1996, pp� 125-143� Gossman, Lionel� “Anecdote and History�” History and Theory, vol� 42, no� 2, 2003, pp� 143-168� Gross, John J� “Introduction�” The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes� Oxford / New York: Oxford UP , 2006, vii-xiii� Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 347 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 Hall, Stuart� Familiar Stranger: A Life between Two Islands� Durham, NC: Duke UP Books, 2018� Harper, Lila Marz� Solitary Travelers: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Travel Narratives and Scientific Vocation. Madison, NJ : Fairleigh Dickinson UP , 2001� Hawthorne, Evelyn J� “Self-Writing, Literary Traditions, and Post-Emancipation Identity: The Case of Mary Seacole�” Biography, vol� 23, no� 2, 2000, pp� 309-331� Hénaff, Marcel, and Jean-Louis Morhange� “The Anecdotal: Truth in Detail�” SubStance, vol� 38, no� 1 / 118, 2009, pp� 97-111� Howell, Jessica� “Mrs� Seacole Prescribes Hybridity: Constitutional and Maternal Rhetoric in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands�” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol� 38, no� 1, 2010, pp� 107-125� Johnson, Samuel� “Anecdote�” A Dictionary of the English Language. London: J� F� And C� Rivington, 1785, https: / / archive�org/ details/ dictionaryofengl01 johnuoft/ mode / 2up- ? q=anecdote� Accessed 25 Sept� 2020� Kamps, Ivo� “New Historicizing the New Historicism; or Did Stephen Greenblatt Watch the Evening News in Early 1968? ” Historicising Theory, edited by Peter C� Herman� Albany: State U of New York P, 2003, pp� 159-189� Kennedy, Valerie� “Kingsley’s Multiple Voices in Travels in West Africa�” In-between Two Worlds: Narratives by Female Explorers and Travellers 1850-1945, edited by Béatrice Bijon and Gérard Gâcon� New York: Peter Lang, 2009, pp� 153-166� Kingsley, Mary� “The Fetish View of the Human Soul�” Folklore, vol� 8, no� 2, 1897, pp� 138-151� ---� Travels in West Africa� Washington D� C�: National Geographic, 2002� ---� Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons� Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 2010� Lawrence, Karen R� “‘The African Wanderers’: Kingsley and Lee�” Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition� Ithaca, NY : Cornell UP , 2018, pp� 104-153� Lee, Mackenzi, and Petra Eriksson� “Mary Seacole�” Bygone Badass Broads: 52 Forgotten Women Who Changed the World� New York: Abrams Image, 2018� Leighton, Mary Elizabeth, and Lisa Surridge� The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Prose 1832-1901� Buffalo: Broadview Press, 2012� Levi, Giovanni� “On Microhistory�” New Perspectives on Historical Writing, edited by Peter Burke, 2 nd ed� Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001, pp� 97-119� “lily, n� and adj�” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP , 2020, www�oed�com/ view/ Entry/ 108375� Accessed 25 Sept� 2020� Loveless, Natalie S� “Reading With Knots: On Jane Galopp’s Anecdotal Theory�” Journal of the Jan van Eyck Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique, vol� 4, 2011, pp� 24-36� McKenna, Bernard� “‘Fancies of Exclusive Possession’: Validation and Dissociation in Mary Seacole’s England and Caribbean�” Philological Quarterly, vol� 76, no� 2, 1997, pp� 219-239� Mills, Sara� “Mary Kingsley: Travels in West Africa (1897)�” Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism� London: Routledge, 1991, pp� 153-174� Moakler, Laura L� “Mary Seacole (1805-1881)�” African American Authors, 1745-1945: Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S� Nelson� Westport, CT : Greenwood Press, 2000, pp� 371-374� 348 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 Nayar, Pramod K� “Black Mobility and the Construction of the Self: Mary Seacole’s The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands�” IUP Journal of English Studies, vol� 6, no� 2, 2011, pp� 44-50� Om, Donghee� “From the Black Sea to the Black Atlantic: Blackness and Performativity in The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, vol� 125, 2015, pp� 76-100� “Our Very Own Vivandière�” Punch, vol� 32, 30 May 1857, p� 221� https: / / archive�org/ details/ punch32a33lemouoft/ page/ 220/ mode/ 2up� Accessed 25 Sept� 2020� Palmer, Alan� “Seacole [née Grant], Mary Jane (1805-1881)�” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2006, https: / / doi-org�uaccess�univie�ac�at/ 10�1093/ ref: odnb / 41 194� Accessed 25 Sept� 2020� Pearce, Robert� Mary Kingsley: Light at the Heart of Darkness� Oxford: The Kensal Press, 1990� Peltonen, Matti� “The Method of Clues and History Theory�” Historical Knowledge: In Quest of Theory, Method and Evidence, edited by Susanna Fellman and Marjatta Rahikainen� Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012, pp� 45-76� Poon, Angelia� “Comic Acts of (Be)Longing: Performing Englishness in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands�” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol� 35, no� 2, 2007, pp� 501-516� Pouchet Paquet, Sandra� “The Enigma of Arrival: The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands.” African-American Review, vol� 26, no� 4, 1992, pp� 651-663� Pratt, Mary Louise� “Arts of the Contact Zone�” Profession, 1991, pp� 33-40� ---� Imperial Eyes� New York: Routledge, 1993� Robinson, Amy� “Authority and the Public Display of Identity: Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands�” Feminist Studies, vol� 20, no� 3, 1994, pp� 537-557� Robinson, Jane� Mary Seacole: The Charismatic Black Nurse Who Became a Heroine of the Crimea� London: Constable & Robinson, 2006� ---� Mary Seacole: The Most Famous Black Woman of the Victorian Age. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004� ---, editor� Unsuitable for Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellers� Oxford: Oxford UP , 1994� Salih, Sarah� “‘A gallant heart to the empire’: Autoethnography and Imperial Identity in Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures�” Philological Quarterly, vol� 83, no� 2, 2004, pp� 171-195� ---� “Chronology�” Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands� London: Penguin, 2005, pp� ix-xiii� Seacole, Mary� Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands� London: Penguin, 2005� Staring-Derks, et al� “Mary Seacole: Global Nurse Extraordinare�” Journal of Advanced Nursing, vol� 71, no� 3, 2014, pp� 514-525� “To the Royal Geographical Society�” Punch, vol� 104, 10 June 1893, p� 269� https: / / archive� org/ details/ punchvol104a105lemouoft/ page/ n309/ mode/ 2 up� Accessed 25 Sept� 2020� van Manen, Max� “By the Light of Anecdote�” Phenomenology + Pedagogy, vol� 7, 1989, pp� 232-253� van Rhyssen, Stefaan� Review of Anecdotal Theory, by Jane Galopp� Leonardo, vol� 37, no� 5, 2004, pp� 407-408�