WOMEN OF THE WORLD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 915, 22 February 1957, Page 13

WOMEN OF THE WORLD

ENCHANTING BELLAMY, by Cyril Hughes artmann; Heinemann, English price 15/-. THIS IS YOUR HOME, a Portrait of Mary Kingsley, by Kathleen Wallace; Heinemann, English price 16/-.' E NCHANTING BELLAMY is required reading for anybody interested in 18th century England. It mirrors the period with as racy and sure a touch as Boswell. George Anne Bellamy was the natural daughter of James O’Hara, Lord Tyrawley, a brave Irish soldier who fortified Gibraltar at his own expense, was wounded in action as often as Lord Freyberg, became a Field Marshal, and was Ambassador at Lisbon and St. Petersburg. He publicly acknowledged George Anne to be one of his numerous natural children and treated her with generosity. Her beauty and talent led her to high success on the stage, and her adventures, her misadventures, her doings in the raffish theatreland of her day (where she acted with Garrick and Quin) and her close aristocratic and political connections and, alas, her acguaintance also with moneylenders and with debtors’ prisons, provide material (continued on next page)

BOOKS (continued from previous page) for this excellent study. Her admirers were many and included Fox, Chesterfield and Johnson. In the Dictionary of National Biography (1885 edition at our local city library) one finds it solemnly stated that "her private adventures cannot be followed." Mr. Hartmann does so, however, and shows that her conduct, while irregular, was not depraved. He limns with touching skill her gay, open and feckless character. This Is Your Home is the story of the unusual Mary Kingsley, who adventured in Africa and learned to navigate and was an authority on fish and on Negro fetishes. It is not very well put together, and one has the feeling that Mary Kingsley’s own accounts (she wrote several) would provide better

reading.

F. J.

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