Winner of the Mbokodo Award for Women in the Arts for Literature, the ATKV (Afrikaans Language and Culture Association) Award for non-fiction and the kykNet/Rapport Award for non-fiction. 'Here was Emily . . . in these diaries and scrapbooks. An unprecedented, intimate angle on the real Emily' Elsabé Brits has drawn on a treasure trove of previously private sources, including Emily Hobhouse's diaries, scrap-books and numerous letters that she discovered in Canada, to write a revealing new biography of this remarkable Englishwoman. Hobhouse has been little celebrated in her own country, but she is still revered in South Africa, where she worked so courageously, selflessly and tirelessly to save lives and ameliorate the suffering of thousands of women and children interned in camps set up by British forces during the Anglo-Boer War, in which it is estimated that over 27,000 Boer women and children died; and where her ashes are enshrined in the National Women's Monument in Bloemfontein. During the First World War, Hobhouse was an ardent pacifist. She organised the writing, signing and publishing in January 1915 of the 'Open Christmas Letter' addressed 'To the Women of Germany and Austria'. In an attempt to initiate a peace process, she also secretly metwith the German foreign minister Gottlieb von Jagow in Berlin, for which some branded her a traitor. In the war's immediate aftermath she worked for the Save the Children Fund in Leipzig and Vienna, feeding daily for over a year thousands of children, who would otherwise have starved. She later started her own feeding scheme to alleviate ongoing famine. Despite having been instrumental in saving thousands of lives during two wars, Hobhouse died alone - spurned by her country, her friends and even some of her relatives. Brits brings Emily's inspirational and often astonishing story, spanning three continents, back into the light.

The black spot—the one very black spot—in the picture is the frightful mortality in the Concentration Camps. I entirely agree with you in thinking, that while a hundred explanations may be offered and a hundred excuses made, they do not really amount to any adequate defence. I should much prefer to say at once, so far as the Civil authorities are concerned, that we were suddenly confronted with a problem not of our making, with which it was beyond our power properly to grapple. And no doubt its vastness was not realised soon enough. It was not till six weeks or two months ago that it dawned on me personally, (I cannot speak for others), that the enormous mortality was not merely incidental to the first formation of the camps and the sudden inrush of thousands of people already sick and starving, but was going to continue. The fact that it continues, is no doubt a condemnation of the Camp system. The whole thing, I think now, has been a mistake.Alfred Milner to Joseph Chamberlain, December 7th, 1901The British scorched earth policy during the last phase of the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 led to the burning of farms, the destruction of homesteads, harvests and livestock and to the internment of the civil population in the so-called concentration camps. There, people—mainly women and children—died of malnutrition and diseases such as measles, pneumonia and typhoid. The death rate in the camps was so high—nearly 28,000 white Boers succumbed—that the English population, renowned for its gallantry and chivalry, was consternated. Lloyd George blamed his government for its policy of extermination, Campbell-Bannerman spoke of methods of barbarism, and philanthropic institutions protested, led by Emily Hobhouse, who was the first civilian to investigate the conditions of the camps. The government reacted and sent a ladies' commission under the leadership of Millicent Garrett Fawcett to South Africa.Birgit Seibold's study is the first to compare the 'inofficial' and the official report on the camps and to give an insight into conditions in each of the thirty-three white concentration camps. Based on first-hand research among the Hobhouse manuscripts, this book is both scholarly and compulsively readable.

That Bloody Woman is the story of a discarded heroine. Now virtually forgotten, Emily Hobhouse was in her time one of the most controversial figures in the world, hailed as a second Joan of Arc or Florence Nightingale yet denounced as a traitor to her country. Lord Kitchener ordered her forcible deportation on a troopship and Joseph Chamberlain wondered if she posed a threat to the whole British Empire. But to her friend Mahatma Gandhi, one of a tiny minority who admired her pacifist campaigns through two wars, she was one of the noblest and bravest of women.

A fearless female champion for justice and humanity Today, the term 'concentration camp' is synonymous with the horrors perpetrated by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Nevertheless, concentration camps were not a Nazi innovation, for the British created them during the Boer War in South Africa at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In an attempt to apply pressure on men serving with Boer forces to capitulate, the British extensively burned Boer homesteads and farms, slaughtered their livestock, dispossessed families of their property and forcibly incarcerated women and children in concentration camps. Emily Hobhouse, a British woman born before her time, was a welfare campaigner, feminist and an activist for women's suffrage. She was aware of the social injustice of the camps, and of the terrible conditions in them which resulted in widespread deprivation, hunger and death from disease among the inmates. Hobhouse made it her mission to bring these outrages to public awareness and worked tirelessly for improved conditions in the camps and, ultimately, for their abolition. She was the bane of the British authorities and an abiding heroine to the South African people. In this, her own book on the subject, she exposes a little known imperial scandal. It was originally published at the time of the war, under the title 'The Brunt of the War and Where it Fell'. This Leonaur edition has been enhanced by the inclusion of many illustrations and photographs which were not included when the book was first published. Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their spines and fabric head and tail bands.

In 1918 Emily Hobhouse was 58 and a partial invalid. She could have retired to her beloved Cornwall to write her memoirs but the plight of the children of Europe, half starved by war restrictions, called her to new works. Helped by the Save the Children Fund and people of the South Africa, her main scheme was to provide meals for thousands of children in the city of Leipzig, Germany. Then the South Africans remembering how she had helped and encouraged their own women and children in the Anglo Boer war of 1899-1902 gave her money for a house in Cornwall where she could write. Her ashes were interred in the War Memorial in South Africa dedicated to the women and children whom long ago she had done so much to help. Though often sick hers was a life of Service and shows what determination can achieve.