Jules Stewart reviews Jane Dismore’s latest book, No Country for a Woman, out now
When Lady Dorothy Mills was a young girl, a female relative told her she would never be beautiful, so she had better be interesting. As a bold and determined woman from one of Britain’s oldest political and literary families, the Walpoles, she became just that.
So author Jane Dismore introduces us to the woman who boldly defied expectation, taking control of her destiny to become the most popular female explorer of the early 20th century. Over the course of her adventurous years of the 1920s and ’30s, Mills, known throughout her life as Dolly, turned her adventures and life experiences into highly acclaimed travel books and escapist novels and she was seldom out of the public eye. Dolly also contributed feminist features to newspapers at a time when women were beginning to claim new freedoms, in the period between the two world wars.
Dolly embarked on daring and far-flung travels during this volatile period, at a time when the world was emerging from the chaos of the Great War and reshaping itself politically and culturally.
Born into the patriarchal society of the late- Victorian era, Dolly was determined not to be limited or overlooked by its social constraints imposed by conservative and hierarchical society. ‘I must be something,’ she wrote. Early in her life, Dolly manifested her determination to be that different person one
balmy June morning in 1916.
The guests assembled at St Paul’s Church in Knightsbridge were astonished by the spectacle of a bride emerging from the church in a never-before-seen gold and white wedding gown.
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Lady Dorothy Rachel Melissa Walpole, age 27, petite and bold, wanted to make a statement to those naysayers who held little hope for her happiness. The decision to wear a gold wedding dress was typical of Dolly’s originality. Her fiancé, who she married against her family’s wishes, was a more sober reminder of the times. Captain Arthur Frederick Hobart Mills wore the uniform of his regiment, the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry.
After three years of marriage, in December 1919 as the second of her nine novels, The Laughter of Fools, was nearing publication, Dolly embarked on her African tour, seeking a warmer climate for her fragile health.
She travelled to Algiers, specifically to Biskra and beyond, where she discovered the Sahara and the great wild places of Africa. ‘Or rather, they found me,’ she later wrote, ‘and took me in a relentless grasp that to this day has never weakened.’ It was in that vast wilderness that Dolly found the realisation of all the dreams of her childhood and, above all, peace and happiness and rest, along with a respite from all the underlying problems of life.
Dismore takes the reader on a deeply-researched journey along Dolly’s globe-hopping ventures, from Liberia to the Bosphorus, Arabia and Venezuela, each of which was highlighted in her travel books. She is believed to be the first European woman to have set foot in Timbuktu, which was described in her travelogue The Road to Timbuktu. In every country and region she visited, Dolly sought to understand and to convey to her readers a sense of history.
Dolly sustained serious injuries in a car accident in 1929, but no sooner had she recovered, her thirst for travel rose to the surface once again and she set sail from Plymouth for Venezuela, where she was to spend four harrowing months. Her aim was, her own poetic words, ‘to linger where oil – the world’s great motive power – bubbles from the sun-baked earth, to share the thrill of the wide llanos, land of strong men and swift horses, to learn the mystery of the great waterways of the Orinoco’.
Dolly may have travelled alone but she was never lonely. In her autobiography, A Different Drummer, she writes: ‘They are queer things, the friendships of the road…oddly enduring, for they are born of solid materials, bred among the stark realities of hunger and thirst, suffering, privation, and sometimes danger.
In civilisation one makes friends almost automatically, from force of mutual habit and environment, because one instinctively flocks with birds of the same feather as oneself, but the very mutual incongruity of one’s wayside friendships means that they are based on some very definite esteem or sympathy. They are little landmarks of one’s nomadic life, living atoms, who help to make up the mosaic entity of the country that one travels.’
Dismore concludes that only Dolly could have composed such an elegant paean to friends made along the road she was impelled to follow.
‘A woman of her time in certain ways,’ the author says, ‘ahead of it in others, her life provides a prism through which we can see and understand better the issues of the day – race, gender, colonialism, class – while also reminding us of what draws us together rather than what divides us.’
