Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Emily Hahn was one of the most prolific and enduring writers at The New Yorker - her first byline appeared there in 1929, her last in 1996. She was also the author of fifty-three books, and, had her 1933 travel memoir, Congo Solo, not been published in a censored version during the darkest days of the Great Depression, it might well have been hailed as a classic of the genre, alongside Dinesen's Out of Africa. In many ways Hahn's vivid account of her eight-month sojourn in a remote medical clinic was years ahead of its time.
A woman who lived life on her own terms, Hahn was an unknown and struggling writer when Congo Solo was published. Here - restored to the form she had intended - is Hahn's unforgettable narrative, a vivid, provocative, and at times disturbing first-hand account of the racism, brutality, sexism, and exploitation that were everyday life realities under Belgium's iron-fisted colonial rule.
Until now, the few copies of Congo Solo in circulation were the adulterated version, which the author altered after pressure from her publisher and threats of litigation from the main character's family. This edition makes available a lost treasure of women's travel writing that shocks and impresses, while shedding valuable light on the gender and race politics of the period.
"A serious advance in state-of-the-art research. Rapley's scholarship is exceedingly sound. She thinks in such stimulating and logical ways that the exercise is never tedious, always intellectually challenging and, above all, interesting ... The extent of the research is prodigious and Rapley is so familiar with her vast documentation that she's been able to construct a new and more comprehensive interpretation than has previously been imagined of the nature of the social life of women's monasteries under the ancien regime." D. Gillian Thompson, Department of History, University of New Brunswick
"This fascinating, contemporaneous account will appeal to intrepid travelers." Library Journal
"There is a long chain of accounts by literary travellers to the Congo over more than a century, and it is good to have one such revealing narrative carefully restored to an uncensored version at last. The chilling episode at its heart reminds one of the cruel megalomania of Joseph Conrad's Mr. Kurtz." Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost