SOUTH AFRICA IN THE NINETIES
MELINA RORKE: Her Amazing Experiences in the Stormy Nineties of South Africa’s Story. Told by Herself, George G. Harrap, London. 285 pp., with 26 Illustrations. If the test of a book is the reader’s reluctance to lay it down this book gets high marks. Much of it is too sensational to be true, but you think of that afterwards. When you are actually reading her you accept Mrs. Rorke and her story precisely as she presents herself, and it does not matter much if you begin to wonder a day or two later how much is history as it happened and how much adventures reconstructed in tranquillity You just can’t believe, when you begin to think about it, that history was so obliging as to stage so many big events precisely when and where her pen now wants them, but you know from other sources that these events did take place during her life-time, that she was somewhere in South Africa when they happened, and that some of the most dramatic of them caught her up and carried her along with them-the diamond rush at Kimberley, the Matabele rebellion, the siege of Mafeking, the struggle between Kruger and Rhodes. They were moving days, and she was too much alive not to be in the thick of things. To-day she is still too much alive to remember it all without excitement, and her excitement is infectious.
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Bibliographic details
New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 4, 21 July 1939, Page 37
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240SOUTH AFRICA IN THE NINETIES New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 4, 21 July 1939, Page 37
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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