‘I am … but a pawn in your chess board’: letters,self-presentation,and the making of a lady missionary's career

This article explores the epistolary exchanges of a female medical missionary, Mary Ann ‘May’ Harriet Allen, who served with the British Anglican Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) in Zanzibar between 1875 and 1882. In particular, it focuses on two sets of letters—the first is set of letters Allen wrote to her father, which he subsequently published in their local newspaper. The second set comprises letters Allen exchanged with her colleagues at the mission. In the first set of letters, Allen cast herself as the protagonist in an African drama typical of Victorian-era missionary publications, a move that obscured the struggles that Allen was facing in her work on Zanzibar, and about which she wrote in letters to her colleagues. Reading these letters against one another offers insight into the techniques of self-actualization available to women in the nineteenth-century mission field, the strategies some women employed to negotiate the contemporary evangelical and patriarchal hierarchies, and into the interior life of a British ‘lady missionary’ navigating her career in the African mission field.