Lecture given by Alain Quella-Villéger and Christine Ribardière (co-translator).
Margaret Brooke (1849-1936), a British aristocrat, became Rani of Sarawak in Borneo when she married Charles Brooke at the age of twenty. From then on, she led an extraordinary life in a tropical palace: the Astana, in Kuching. Intelligent, strong-willed, open-minded and curious about the lives of the Dayaks and other ‘headhunters’, she learned the Malay language and, as a feminist, promoted women's education...
Lecture given by Alain Quella-Villéger and Christine Ribardière (co-translator).
Margaret Brooke (1849-1936), a British aristocrat, became Rani of Sarawak in Borneo when she married Charles Brooke at the age of twenty. From then on, she led an extraordinary life in a tropical palace: the Astana, in Kuching. Intelligent, strong-willed, open-minded and curious about the lives of the Dayaks and other ‘headhunters’, she learned the Malay language and, as a feminist, promoted women's education in this remote corner of the world, which was visited by the painter and botanist Marianne North, among others.
Margaret Brooke also experienced loneliness, wars, the dangers of the climate and personal tragedies (her first three children died of cholera).
Returning regularly to live in Europe, she frequented the artistic and literary circles of Paris and London and counted Pierre Loti, Sarah Bernhardt, Alice of Monaco, Guy de Maupassant, Oscar Wilde and Rudyard Kipling among her friends.
Between Karen Blixen's Out of Africa and Somerset Maugham's The Malay Magic, she lived a life at the heart of a story of rajahs that inspired Conrad's novel Lord Jim.
