In Beyond Gold and Diamonds: Genre, the Authorial Informant, and the British South African Novel, Melissa Free demonstrates that in order to understand British literature and gender norms from the 1880s to the 1920s, we need to look to the ideological and genre-molding work performed by British South African novels. Establishing British South African literature as a distinct field of study, Free also demonstrates its role in reimagining white British female agency. Beyond Gold and Diamonds will particularly interest readers invested in expanded histories of the British novel and in the gender politics of genre.

Free focuses on “authorial informants”: British authors who spent time in South Africa and wrote about the place as “insiders,” offering a dual viewpoint as both colonizers in South Africa and colonials vis-à-vis the rest of the British public (3, 6). Free's chapters bookend close readings of novels with analyses of historical events and the periodical press, shedding light on how these novelists and their genre innovations intervened in British politics. In chapter 1, Free compares female agency in Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm (1883), usually considered the first New Woman novel, with that in H. Rider Haggard's realist novel Jess (1887). For Free, Story of an African Farm retains conventions of domestic fiction even as it advances a transgressive female protagonist; Jess lacks a feminist agenda yet portrays broader female agency, as its female protagonist kills an Afrikaner leader and symbolically recuperates Britain from losing the First Anglo-Boer War. In what Free labels Haggard's female colonial romances (chapter 2), the heroines similarly combine traditionally masculine qualities with what Free calls “mystical feminism”: supernatural abilities facilitated by connections with Indigenous women (63). Free argues that such imperialist texts can “produce feminist effects” in their very efforts to “thwart or contain” feminism (63). Free then considers Gertrude Page's Rhodesian settler romances (chapter 3) in dialogue with Page's public advocacy for British female immigration to Rhodesia: Page explores sexual opportunities for settler women that hinge on their participation in colonial and white supremacist projects, but she “has no sense of the contingency of white women's position on black labor,” relegating Africans to the margins of her stories (117).

Reading these first three chapters, I was convinced by how Free linked shifting gender expectations to new and hybrid genre categories but unsure about the urgency of examining this imperialist and racist literature (although this becomes clearer later in the book). At times, Free is surprisingly generous toward Haggard and Page, salvaging their depictions of (white) female agency while mentioning imperialism almost as an afterthought––even as Free elsewhere frames these authors as South African and Rhodesian equivalents of India's Kipling (107). What does it mean to resurrect space for (white) female agency from Haggard, who depicts female action in order to “advocate for colonials,” as if British colonists were the primary group marginalized by London (59)? I wanted to hear more about how “feminist effects” of Haggard's writing would be qualified or circumscribed by this erasure of the colonized (63). Likewise, how should readers take the suggestion that Page could be “promoting Rhodesia” to attract more settlers yet simultaneously “speaking to power” (114)?

Free does, however, mention ways in which emergent British feminisms buttressed imperialism and racism. The most generative contributions in chapters 1, 2, and 3 are those moments when Free brings race and racism from the periphery of the discussion to the center, foregrounding specific ways in which shifting British gender ideologies were racialized. For example, at the end of chapter 3, Free considers how Doris Lessing's novel The Grass is Singing (1950) builds upon Page. Like Page, Lessing foregrounds female erotic interests beyond marriage, but by exploring a white settler's combination of antipathy and fascination toward her Black servant, Lessing confronts that “colonial belonging is always contingent on the denial of indigenous belonging” (133). In such passages, Free acknowledges the racial consequences and colonial violence of settler advocacy for white female agency––a crucial entanglement that I wished she would address more consistently.

In chapter 4 and the epilogue, Free more clearly establishes antiracist reasons to attend to British South African literature. In chapter 4, she excoriates John Buchan's 1910 novel Prester John, in which Afrikaners disappear and leave the British to rule benevolently over Africans, implying that “whiteness itself is a function of Britishness” (136). With this fantasy of an anglicized South Africa, Prester John exemplifies a specifically British white supremacist claim, a legacy “too often whitewashed by those who, rightly attributing apartheid to Afrikaner nationalism, wrongly overlook its roots in British soil” and in British failures to support Black voting rights (153). Free demonstrates the value of studying British South African literature in order to historicize white supremacy in South Africa, nuancing accounts of Afrikaner nationalism by also documenting British visions of defeating both Africans and Afrikaners.

In the epilogue, Free reprises her claim that a South African imaginary enabled British genre innovation by demonstrating South Africa's importance in Buchan's spy thrillers. She then turns to Sol Plaatje's Mhudi (1930), the first novel in English by a Black South African. Free argues that Mhudi combines elements of African orality and European adventure fiction with tropes from the female colonial romance. Whereas Haggard's romances “deny African claims to belonging,” Plaatje borrows from the genre to affirm African belonging and depict cross-ethnic friendships among Bechuana, Matabele, and Boer actors (164). According to Free, Mhudi thus demonstrates the influence of British South African literature on the genre “hybridity of black South African writing and resistance” (171). With this concluding note, Free nods to the importance of recentering Black South African voices. Although such a recentering is largely beyond the scope of Beyond Gold and Diamonds, Free persuasively shows that British South African literature both expands the imagined horizons for white British women and changes the genre horizons of British literature more broadly.