A lost treasure of women's travel writing that shocks and impresses, while shedding valuable light on the gender and race politics of the period

Emily Hahn was one of the most prolific and enduring writers at The New Yorker - her first byline appeared there in 1929, her last in 1996. She was also the author of fifty-three books, and, had her 1933 travel memoir, Congo Solo, not been published in a censored version during the darkest days of the Great Depression, it might well have been hailed as a classic of the genre, alongside Dinesen's Out of Africa. In many ways Hahn's vivid account of her eight-month sojourn in a remote medical clinic was years ahead of its time.