Dorothea Fairbridge

Dorothea Ann Fairbridge (1862–1931) was a South African author and co-founder of the Guild of Loyal Women.

Fairbridge was the daughter of a distinguished lawyer, scholar and Cape Town parliamentarian, and a cousin of Kingsley Fairbridge (1885–1924; the Rhodesian poet and founder of the "Fairbridge Society"). She was educated in London and travelled widely.

As a highly respected third generation British settler, Fairbridge was a pillar of the colonial establishment and met with British women from the upper social classes who came out to South Africa from Britain before and during the Second Boer War. She was a founding member of the Guild of Loyal Women, a charitable organisation that encouraged women in South Africa support the British Empire during the war and to give practical help to British Empire forces engaged in the conflict (such as ensuring that the relatives of dead soldiers were contacted, and that the graves of were properly marked and recorded). When the Guild sent members to Britain to explain what they were doing and to raise money, women who had the ear of the male British establishment formed the Victoria League to support the Guild and to promote links between organisations within the British Empire run by women that supported the Empire. These women induced Violet Markham, Edith Lyttelton, Violet Cecil and Margaret, Countess of Jersey all of whom had met Dorothea Fairbridge socially.

After the Boer war, Fairbridge continued to support keeping South Africa closely integrated in the British Empire and sought to establish the Union of South Africa, with a reconciled population and a shared sense of South African history, within a constitutional arrangement that encouraged close ties with the rest of the British Empire.

Works

Her works include:

• That Which Hath Been (1910) — a novel set in the early in the Cape's history.
• Piet of Italy (1913)
• The Torch Bearer (1915)
• History of South Africa (1917) — a school history
• Historic Houses of South Africa (1922) — a study of old Cape Dutch farmsteads
• Along Cape Roads (1928) — A travel guide
• The Pilgrim's Way in South Africa (1928) — a travel guide
• Historic Farms of South Africa (1932) — a study of old Cape Dutch farmsteads

Fairbridge edited:

• Lady Anne Barard's Cape diaries (1924)
• Lady Duff Gordon's Letters fom the Cape (1927)

• ^ Sage, Greer & Showalter 1999.
• ^ Bush 2000, p. 90.