‘No Country for a Woman: The Adventurous Life of Lady Dorothy Mills, Explorer and Writer’
By Jane Dismore
The History Press, 256 pages

She was not supposed to marry an impecunious army captain, Arthur F. H. Mills, and travel all over the world, write about her adventures, especially in West Africa, and become a popular novelist as well. Her unimpressed lordly father, a descendent of Horace Walpole, the 18th century English writer best known for his gothic masterpiece, “The Castle of Otranto,” disinherited her.

The diminutive Lady Dorothy, called Dolly by her friends, made her reputation by becoming the first Englishwoman to travel to Timbuktu, doing it on her own, relying when necessary on local guides and government officials. Her husband, also a writer, did his own traveling, and the couple would rendezvous somewhere after three months apart to socialize and be lionized by a society intrigued by this unusual pair. 

Dorothy Mills touted this peripatetic marriage that kept the couple supple and still intrigued with one another. What they actually thought about their unconventional lives remains a mystery even to their biographer. Whatever correspondence there might have been between them has not survived, and though Mills wrote an autobiography, she said little about intimate matters.

So what is a biographer to do? Well, Mills was in the newspapers a lot, and her time in Liberia, for example, was sensationalized to emphasize her encounters with cannibals and her daring defiance of dangerous situations as she penetrated deeply into the lives of so-called “primitive” women and men who found her just as exotic as her readers did.

Reading a Dorothy Mills book, as Jane Dismore shows, caused her readers to reflect on the state of womanhood throughout the world. In different cultures, in Venezuela and parts of Asia and Africa, women had remarkably different lives: Some of them were cosseted by husbands and given little to do, and others practically took charge and could declare a divorce simply by throwing the man’s belongings out on the street.

Why travel alone? Mills explained that she did not want to deal with the concerns of companions who would interfere with her single-minded wish to immerse herself in foreign lands, surrendering to what people had to show and tell her. Dolly seems to have enjoyed the exclusive focus on herself.  She thought she was actually safer as a single woman, posing no threat in areas that had never seen a white Englishwoman. 

That is not say there were not scrapes and worse — in one instance some vicious escaped criminals might have raped or killed her if she had not fired off a shot from a gun she usually carried with her. Ms. Dismore generally does not go beyond what Mills said about her own adventures, although she does lapse occasionally into that biographer’s bilge about what her subject must have felt.  

Why Mills is not better known is handled in an epilogue. Ms. Dismore suggests that Dolly never recovered from her husband’s adultery and their subsequent divorce. After her heyday in the years after World War I, she stopped traveling and wrote no more books. She remained proud of her legacy and left a will supporting the work of other women travelers and writers, but otherwise did nothing to maintain a prominent place in public life.

In a much needed appendix, Ms. Dismore provides a sample of Mills’s writing, a chapter titled “Written in Sand,” from her autobiography, “A Different Drummer,” that is palpable in its presentation of a questing spirit: 

“ ‘L’Serab! Le Mirage.’ The cry dragged me from a state of dazed stupefaction induced by the rhythmic laboured rumbling of the great Renault ‘my rover,’ under the merciless brilliance of sunshine on brassily-gold shifting sand-dunes, as we approached the Souf. We made up an incongruous over-loaded freight of hot humanity, I and a score of plump, prosperous Arabs, piled up all anyhow, piloted by a French chauffeur who had shared with distinction in a famous trans-Saharan ‘Mission’ a few years  previously, before drink and too much love of living had reduced him to itinerant driver of an Arab firm of cars.”

That is the first paragraph.  Don’t you want to go on?

Mr. Rollyson is author of “Nothing Ever Happens to the Brave: The Story of Martha Gellhorn, The Adventurous Life of America’s Most Glamorous and Courageous War Correspondent.”