Constructing a Humanitarian Self: Emily Hobhouse’s Auto/Biographical Traces, 1899-1926

ABSTRACT Following her relief work during and after the 1899-1902 South African War, British suffragist and humanitarian Emily Hobhouse (1860-1926) testified to her humanitarianism in several auto/biographical forms, all of them incorporating Boer women's accounts of wartime suffering. We consider the implications of Schaffer and Smith's (2004) 'ethics of recognition' for Hobhouse's construction of her humanitarian authority and the processes whereby the accounts themselves became 'untouchable' testimonies. In examining the iterations of Hobhouse's life writing as emotional practices, we analyse her felt morality, explore her urge to personal accountability, and consider to what purposes her auto/biography was co-produced in South Africa.


Introduction
One of the central features of the biographical turn in the humanities and social sciences in the last three decades has been a recognition of the interplays between biography and autobiography -hence, auto/biography -and an acknowledgement that autobiography always constructs rather than simply reflects a self. 1 Taking this theoretical premise as its starting point, this article examines the auto/biography of the British humanitarian and peace activist Emily Hobhouse (1860Hobhouse ( -1926. Hobhouse is best known, indeed infamous, for her exposé of conditions in the concentration camps of the South African War (1899)(1900)(1901)(1902). In December 1900, as representative of the South African Women and Children's Distress Relief Fund, she travelled to South Africa from Britain and visited several of the camps set up by the British military to accommodate Boer civilians displaced by the war, particularly by their 'scorched earth' policy of farm-burnings. 2 Hobhouse was also an active suffragist and pacifist, and after the First World War engaged in relief work in Germany, latterly on behalf of the newly-founded Save the Children Fund. 3 During the 1920s, she published testimonies of Boer women's suffering in the South African War, The Brunt of the War and Where it Fell (1902), Tant' Alie (1923) and War Without Glamour (1927), intended as historical correctives of 'official' accounts, and wrote an unpublished epistolary memoir. 4 Hobhouse's commentaries in these writings exude a quality of sisterly 'fellow feeling' that has been described by Ingrid Sharp as a feminist-pacifist 'discourse of love' intended to reconcile feminists of warring nations in the period after the First World War. 5 Hobhouse's writings were also distinguished by a gendered critique of war which rested upon her sympathetic account of the suffering of 'enemy' civilians, particularly women and children. These, she argued, bore the brunt of war through domestic hardship and familial loss, and required urgent political redress. 6 In this article we treat all of these writings as auto/biographical. They constituted at once a feminist politics of felt morality, and Hobhouse's humanitarian self.
Hobhouse's auto/biographical writings are a particularly distinctive example of the construction of the feminist humanitarian self in the early twentieth century as having capacity to know (cognitively, emotionally and sensorily) of the suffering of others, and to feel it to be morally wrong. This was a specific form of sympathetic knowledge which was underscored by an appropriation of the personal testimony of Boer women in what Schaffer and Smith describe as an 'ethics of recognition'. 7 It also contributed to what Tammy Proctor has termed the 'invention' of the archetypal civilian in modern war as the innocent woman or child. 8 Hobhouse's selection and editing of stories of suffering served a pacifist agenda which decried the violent imperialist overthrow of a freeborn people; yet these elided evidence of bellicosity amongst many Boer women at the time, and also ignored the experiences of Black South Africans in the camps. 9 Crucially, we argue, Hobhouse's auto/biography was co-produced, not only in Hobhouse's publications, which relied for their moral authority on her sympathetic observations and 'objective' selections of Boer women's testimony, but also in the memorialisation of Hobhouse as the ultimate arbiter and witness to Boer suffering and victimisation by proto-nationalist Afrikaner women's groups in the 1920s, not least in the translation and republication of her writings. This often-overlooked aspect of women's cultural nationalism in South Africa directly informed a racial politics of suffering: subsequent Afrikaans editions of Hobhouse's work overwrote her feminist-pacifist moral with a strident Afrikaner nationalist narrative of racial survival and justified contemporary policies of segregation. In thus situating Hobhouse's writings at a convergence of feminist sympathy and an emerging Afrikaner nationalist community of 'shared suffering', we point to the wider significance of the emotional and moral work of auto/biography in the creation of the humanitarian self and the complicated ethics of recognition through personal testimony. It is in emphasising these relational and reciprocal practices that we see the construction of Hobhouse's humanitarian auto/biography as an exemplary act of selfrealisation and public moralism, and can begin to address humanitarian narratives within local contexts of collaboration and meaning.

Constructing a humanitarian self
Hobhouse's auto/biographical traces are diverse and wide-ranging and, in some cases, take overlapping forms. She was a prolific letter writer, though she did not keep a regular diary. 10 Her draft memoir was itself written in the form of an extended letter to Mrs Steyn, wife of the former President of the Free State M.T. Steyn, and after their meeting in the South African War, Hobhouse's lifelong correspondent. 11 It drew 'largely, dear Friend, upon my old letters', for Hobhouse noted that she was 'temperamentally incompetent' to keep a journal, and that diary-writing 'was only to accentuate my solitariness'. In penning her memoir, she explained that, 'This curious feeling of wanting some sympathetic person to whom to ^speak with the pen^ persists and you see an instance in this memoir which I felt I could not write except in the form of a letter to yourself'. 12 Recent discussions of life writing and auto/biography have recognised the multiple and sometimes unexpected forms such writing can take. In her exploration of auto/biographical traces in Hannah Arendt's political writings, Grayck suggests that though, Arendt never produced any explicitly autobiographical materials, she did seek to establish a kind of co-constitutive, dialogical and intellectual rapport with both her abstracted readership and intimate interlocutors, thus injecting some subtle but very personal aspects of herself into her theoretical writing. Integral to this project is Arendt's stated drive to understand and to be understood. 13 Grayck's conceptualisation of Arendt's life writing as a dialogic quest 'to understand and to be understood' resonates strongly with the tenor of Hobhouse's auto/biographical outputs.
These writings included empirical historical texts intended to oppose 'jingoistic' accounts of the South African War. Hobhouse admonished The Times', History of the War in South Africa for its 'scant mention of this central fact of the war -the treatment and fate of the general population, women and children'. 14 'All I wanted was to put down the facts as plainly and simply as I could', she reflected later of The Brunt, 'It seems to me a matter of first importance that English men and women should know in this way, from the lips of the victims, what a war of conquest urged by a Christian nation really means'. 15 A parallel can be drawn with Reynolds' depiction of Churchill simultaneously constructing his own auto/biography and the history of the Second World War as inextricably linked, 'there is a sense in which, for Churchill, all history was autobiography. [. . .] In his view, British history was a narrative of the deeds of great men (definitely men), and most of those men were intertwined with the saga of his own family' -and, of course, with himself and his own career. 16 Nevertheless, Hobhouse's auto/biographical writing as a form of twentieth-century women's international politicking is easy to miss if focus is concentrated on diplomatic histories, traditional political memoir, the Radical pantheon, or even dominant histories of the suffragette movement. While Cowman explores the elision of history and memoir in the writings of prominent members of the women's suffrage campaign, she notes that pacifist suffragists were excluded. 17 The leader of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, expunged Hobhouse and other critics from her memoir. 18 Though Hobhouse is a largely forgotten figure in Britain, several biographies have appeared over the years. These have tended to emphasise her singularity rather than her wider political or social context. 19 This is despite the fact that, to a greater or lesser extent, biographies of Hobhouse derive in large part from her own auto/biographical outputs, especially her draft memoir. Some appear to struggle with placing her as a female 'trouble maker' and treat her as something of a 'loose cannon', describing her in terms such as 'feisty' and casting her as a 'rebel', while others are straightforward hagiographies, celebrating her as a heroine. 20 Thus for example, Ruth Fry quoted large sections verbatim from Hobhouse's epistolary memoir in compiling the first biography of Hobhouse in 1929. Fry had worked with Hobhouse in the Boer Home Industries scheme after the South African War and, as general secretary of the Friends War Victims' Relief Committee, oversaw the provision of British Quaker relief to civilians in Central Europe after the First World War. Fry's honouring of Hobhouse was a re-statement of shared commitment in the face of controversy, for it was 'in helping only ex-enemy children', that they, 'desired that their efforts should carry a special message of peace'. 21 Our conception of Hobhouse's sympathy as a felt morality for the injustice of war owes much to Boddice's utilisation of 'moral economy' to describe how ways of knowing (in this case sympathy as enlightened understanding), and the power dynamics and evaluations this involved (here the collection and adjudication of testimony), are shaped by habitus, or the culturally informed dispositions which include 'emotions (or affects) as part of individual and collective cognition'. 22 This draws on Scheer's work on emotionsas-practice, whereby habitus in turn produces the behaviours and practices, for example life-writing, which generate culturally specific notions of selfhood, including free will, agency -and sympathy -attributed to the liberal self in this period. 23 Boddice describes the political and scientific confidence that men in progressive circles 'could harness their powers of reason to enhance their natural sympathetic qualities. They could also use the instruments of public opinion, [. . .] to improve the sympathetic movements of society in general'. 24 Though he describes the maintenance of an emotional divide between 'sentimental' women and 'stoic' men in this period, Hobhouse's auto/biographical writings constituted a feminist practice of rational 'fellow feeling' that enabled her to make ethical sense of suffering, and to turn this to account in her acts of public moralism; it was also a way of knowing inherent in the very possibility of writing a history of the self in these terms.
As we have already indicated, we find the concept of auto/biography helpful for its consideration of questions of performativity, acknowledging that, in autobiography, the written self and the lived self are never co-terminus, while biography can often reveal at least much about its writer as about its subject. For Stanley, 'Auto/biography, [is] a term I use to encompass all these ways of writing a life'. 25 More recently, the term selfbiography has gained currency, defined by Kusek as 'a narrative which uses traditional (and essentially positivist) techniques of biographical research [. . .] and applies them to the act of writing about its writer's own self'. 26 In her auto/biography, Hobhouse's 'fellow feeling' was not an abstract identification with the pain of others, nor simply a recognition of like-feeling, but the basis of a 'felt bond'. 27 Ablow's description of J. S. Mill's understanding of 'social sympathy -that is, sympathy felt for the collective rather than any one individual' as one in which the liberal self and the social were at once distinguished and interrelated accords with Hobhouse's auto/biographical writings, in which the individual was capable of a sympathetic encounter with the feelings of others and in this discern her own. 28 Historians of humanitarianism, however, have paid scant attention to the narrative construction of the humanitarian self in auto/biographical writings, and have only recently become attuned to Scheer's notion of emotions-as-practice even where they have focused on individual humanitarians and their careers. 29 Historians' approach to humanitarian narrative has been shaped instead by Thomas Laqueur's imperative to ask 'how details about the suffering bodies of others engender compassion and how that compassion comes to be understood as a moral imperative to undertake ameliorative action'. 30 Their ensuing focus has been on understanding the representational strategies of humanitarian accounts, including atrocity narratives and images of suffering used in the visual culture of humanitarian photography and film, and their role in stimulating humanitarian movements. 31 Certainly, for Hobhouse, confrontation with the suffering of others was described as the stimulus to an awakened conscience -what she referred to in a 1911 letter to Boer women as 'the great formative fact in our lives which [. . .] has bound us in one'. 32 Yet, as we argue, rather than an innate sympathetic response to external incitement, in the auto/biographical act, cause, effect and affect are co-constituted. Here we heed Dolores Martín-Moruno's call to undertake 'cultural analysis of narratives and images produced by . . . humanitarian workers' to appraise the creation of 'affective bond[s]'. 33 The significance of this is borne out in Sharp's insight that the 'mobilisation of love' by feminist pacifists of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom's (WILPF) enables 'women's emotional expression', to be viewed, 'as active practices rather than simply a passive response'. 34 Historians have also neglected the coconstruction and negotiation of narrative meaning in a local context, where the moral value of humanitarian self, victim and perpetrator exist in dynamic interchange. As Sara Ahmed notes 'some forms of suffering more than others will be repeated, as they can more easily be appropriated as 'our loss''. 35 Hobhouse's sympathy for Boer women's pain and hardship in the South African War was experienced as a felt morality: a political humiliation at a loss of liberty and a loss of status, a degradation that was sexual, racial and social, a sympathy which in turn delineated an exclusive community of sufferers who privileged Hobhouse as interlocutor.

Hobhouse's auto/biographical acts as public moralism
Three key publications arose from Hobhouse's work in South Africa during and after the South African War. During the war, Hobhouse distributed relief and collected detailed information about people and conditions in the camps to use in petitioning the military authorities to make improvements. Significantly, this involved her collecting short testimonies from Boer women in the camps, a small selection of which she published in her 1901 Report to the Distress Fund and then more fully in her first book, The Brunt of the War and Where It Fell, published a year later. 36 Hobhouse's Introduction to the 1902 edition of The Brunt was an indictment of the British government's methods of war in South Africa, in keeping with British Liberal 'pro-Boer' objections, including those of liberal women's organisations. 37 As 'these facts are already well known in South Africa', it was aimed primarily at winning over a British readership. 38 Her intention was to turn to account the suffering of Boer women and children as an argument for 'universal arbitration' in place of war, '[t]he deaths of the Boer children will not have been in vain', she wrote in The Brunt, 'if their blood shall prove to be the seed of this higher rule of nations'. 39 Hobhouse was keenly attuned to the power of the eyewitness account -both those of first-hand victims of suffering, and her own corroborating witness accounts. After the South African War, Hobhouse took a growing interest in the plight of those Boers who had been left destitute in its aftermath, and, on her return to South Africa in 1903, in leveraging their appeals to the compensation and reparations schemes set up by the government. 'I tried to make their [destitute Boers'] difficult position known by a series of articles in the Manchester Guardian', she reflected later in her memoir, 'but the really effective appeals are those written from the spot'. 40 From the outset, Hobhouse was intensely conscious that, as Whitlock notes, 'life narrative can put a human face on suffering'. 41 Nevertheless, emotional practices were not necessarily consensual, as Schaffer and Smith write, 'Shock and shame can lead to an ethics of recognition and gestures of reconciliation. They can also provoke feelings of guilt and denial'. 42 Certainly in Britain, where Hobhouse's publications were controversial, and her sympathy for Boer suffering was deemed party political rather than humanitarian, the depiction of Boer women as innocent civilians was publicly refuted. 43 During these years, Hobhouse also attempted to generate and sustain affective bonds between Boer women as the basis for their political representation in a peaceful and reconciled (though racially exclusive) South African nation, commenting in her 1911 letter to Boer women, 'You have shown that you can suffer, shewn [sic] also that you can weigh and judge and act in the complicated task of building up a new nation'. 44 Hobhouse's auto/biographical acts had a didactic quality dependent upon an amplified ethics of recognition and her hope of forging new affective bonds. Yet as Whitlock emphasises, 'the recognition of testimony is a political and ethical act', and in light of this reminds us to ask, 'Who tells stories and who doesn't? What stories will find witnesses? Whose interests will be served?', but also, 'what effects were activated by this storytelling for both tellers and listeners? What processes and ethics of recognition authorise this story?' 45 After the First World War, Hobhouse translated and brought to publication the wartime diary of the Boer woman Alie Badenhorst, Tant' Alie of Transvaal, published 1923. A collection of Boer women's wartime testimonies she had prepared for publication appeared posthumously as War Without Glamour in 1927. All three of Hobhouse's major publications -The Brunt of the War, Tant' Alie, and War Without Glamour -evidence Hobhouse's emphasis on obtaining first-hand 'stories by word of mouth'. 46 Like The Brunt, both Tant' Alie and War Without Glamour are framed by Hobhouse-authored Introductions and both were translated and edited by Hobhouse. Hobhouse's new Introduction to the 1923 edition of The Brunt brought the fate of women and children in the First World War into continuity with the suffering in the concentration camps of the South African War. In this way she added her voice to feminist-pacifist critiques of the 'unjust' making of the peace at Versailles. 47 This new Introduction was translated into Afrikaans and intended for a South African readership for 'a book likely to live for generations in their country as the record of an [sic] unique period of suffering, should be expressed in the natural and historic language of the people of that country'. 48 In the name of 'love', she hoped, South African women would join the international pacifist cause and redeem their historical independence, That word 'love' will surely appeal to South African women in its universal embrace and in that belief I dedicate this book to them -to women from whom I personally never heard a word of hatred though I moved among them during their most bitter, woeful days of warsuffering. 49 In War Without Glamour and The Brunt, Hobhouse applied the methods of social science reporting and combined first-hand accounts with statistical information. In The Brunt, for example, Hobhouse elaborated on the 'methodical system of investigation' she pioneered for assessing need in the concentration camps in South Africa, With regard to the outlay of the fund with which I was entrusted, it was too responsible a matter to give other people's money at haphazard, and it would, I felt, be necessary to get some broad idea of how and where it was most needed. To obtain this, I determined to proceed by a methodical system of investigation. By getting answers to a certain simple set of questions, I was able to learn quickly what had been the position of a given family, what was now its condition and what its prospects. Having obtained this simple information, the answers could easily be tabulated [. . .] 50 Such claims were common in the epistemologies of science and social investigation where 'neutrality' was the basis of reason, a facet of the liberal self, and a powerful way of knowing. 51 Alongside advocating for an impartial method of inquiry in relief work, Hobhouse's claims to moral authority were strongly rooted in her conviction of the importance of the felt experience of suffering, and a sympathetic approach. She strongly rejected the notion that relief work could be carried out on instrumentalised lines, as she explained in The Brunt, It was said that I was showing 'personal sympathy' to the people. I replied with astonishment that that was just what I came to do, to give personal sympathy and help in personal troubles. He [Major Goold-Adams; Deputy Commissioner of the Orange River Colony] believed that gifts could be dealt out in a machine-like routine. I said I could not work like that, I must treat the people like fellow-creatures, and share their troubles. He believed this unnecessary. 52 Hobhouse explicitly juxtaposed her own approach of female sympathy with the cold, calculating approach of male officialdom. However, it is also evident that, at times, Hobhouse's intentions clashed with those whose testimonies she brought to publication. For example, in her Preface to War Without Glamour Hobhouse explains that she intended the volume of accounts as 'a real aid to the cause of permanent peace', though a number of the contributors to the book were self-professed bittereinders. 53 She referred to Tant' Alie as 'A powerful Peace Document', though admitted in the Preface that Alie Badenhorst 'was not pacifist in the sense I hold pacifism . . . her mind had not probably conceived the idea that the disputes of nations could be settled by reason and justice . . . but to the full she entered into the horror of war with its infinite tragedies'. 54 When the Afrikaans translation of The Brunt prepared by Mrs. Steyn's son-in-law Dr N.J. Van der Merwe appeared in 1923 with Hobhouse's new Preface, she wrote to Mrs. Steyn to acknowledge 'I do not expect many of you will like my new preface but I have to write as I think & feel to be true, and my standpoint is that of a convinced Pacifist'. 55 Illuminating parallels can be drawn here with an example from post-apartheid South Africa: Antjie Krog's County of My Skull, where Krog's own autobiographical reflections appear alongside testimony from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. 56 As Schaffer and Smith point out, critics of County of My Skull have commented that 'she fragments victim testimony, restaging it in service to a drama of her own making; she culls, selects, edits, and appropriates victim testimony [. . .] in order to shape a compelling narrative that also pursues her own 'personal project of transformation''. 57 Similarly, in positioning herself as interlocutor and mediator of Boer women's suffering, Hobhouse performs the act of awakened conscience at the heart of her auto/biography. Like Krog, it might be said of Hobhouse that, 'In her empathetic identification with the victims, in her desire to feel their suffering and claim her own responsibility, [she] appropriates victim testimony to effect her call for recognition and reconciliation [. . .]'. 58 Schaffer and Smith identify the confluence of what they call the late twentieth-century 'memoir boom' -marked by a proliferation of and interest in personal narratives of all kinds -and the post-1945 rise of human rights discourse as giving rise to 'storytelling in human rights campaigns'. 59 Similarly, Whitlock comments on the 'the power of testimony within discourses of human rights that emerged late last century' and on the 'postwar transnational circuits of truth and reconciliation in the name of human rights' that rested on testimony and life narratives. 60 They argue that this belongs to a longer history of 'humanitarian story-telling'. They note that 'this linkage between stories and actions extends back to the earliest discussions of an international rights movement' and cite Rieff's identification of Henri Dunant's A Memoir of Solferino (1859), a first-hand account of war's horrors, as a founding document of the Geneva Convention and the International Committee of the Red Cross. 61 Whitlock contends that 'Notions of presence, truth, and origins are fundamental to the idea that testimony enables a speaking of truth to power', and that 'Testimony draws deeply on traditions of humanitarianism and rights discourse'. 62 Rather than separate 'stories and actions' or experience and expression in this way, we view the narrative acts associated with the production and authentication of testimony as emotional practices operating within historically specific moral economies and distributions of power. This is particularly pertinent in a South African context, where Hobhouse's sympathetic witnessing of enemy civilians' suffering as grounds for reconciliation (between white South Africans of British and Boer descent) was cited as a model for truth and reconciliation during post-Apartheid nation building, thereby at once contributing to the continued co-production of Hobhouse's auto/biography in South Africa and obscuring her ethics of recognition, which were blind to Black South Africans' experiences. 63 Elsewhere, Schaffer and Smith point to the importance of written, published personal testimony in human rights campaigns, but alongside this examine the multiple other forums -'venues of story-telling' -which give expression to victims of oppression or human rights violations, including 'fact finding in the field', 'collections of testimonies', and 'stories and the media'. 64 As we have seen, Hobhouse's auto/biographical outputs embrace all these modes of testimony. Assessing these 'venues of story-telling', Schaffer and Smith suggest that 'some intend to make objective, juridical claims on specific listeners, while others evoke emotive responses that prompt popular awareness and activism'. 65 In Hobhouse's life writings, testimony was intended to function in both these ways: yet we reject the binary distinction between 'objective' testimony, and 'compromised', mediated testimony. Hobhouse herself frequently authenticated Boer women's testimonies with her own personal eye witnessing. This adjudication of what qualifies as evidence was itself a practical act of knowledge and recognition, and crucial to the making of her humanitarian self.
In the Preface to War Without Glamour, the collection of women's accounts she had gathered in 1903, Hobhouse commented 'I take no responsibility for any opinions expressed in these records but I offer them to the public in the full belief of the accuracy of the facts, for these are endorsed by my personal observations and experience and by countless other women whose names will never be known but who related to me their stories by word of mouth'. 66 We do not read her comment 'I take no responsibility for any opinions expressed' as Hobhouse 'drawing her distance from opinions she disagreed with' as suggested by Liz Stanley, but as consistent with her emphasis on her rational and objective humanitarian knowledge. 67 This is not to minimise Boer hardship, but rather to illuminate the process whereby the humanitarian self is enacted through direct forms of auto/biographical writing (letters, diaries, memoirs), and the framing, mediation, and deployment of victim testimony. Just as these testimonies of suffering produce victims -'Personal testimony, understood and judged unproblematically as evidentiary, turns the speaker into a victim and moulds his or her story into a case history, a piece of positivist evidence' -so too mediated testimonies produce humanitarian agency. 68 Hobhouse further commented in the Preface, 'In these Boer records, added to those that have already been published, we have therefore a body of evidence of utmost value not only to South Africa but to the world at large of how war acts upon non-combatants and a graphic picture of the misery it inflicts upon those most innocent of its cause'. 69 These stories were, for Hobhouse, not only first-hand witness accounts she could personally vouch for, but constituted a 'body of evidence' that vouched for her own humanitarian credentials.

The co-production of Hobhouse's biography South Africa
In this second part of our paper, we explore the complex, troubled and multi-layered ethics of recognition involved in Hobhouse's auto/biographical outputs in the context of South African nationalism. Here we reflect in particular on the co-production of Hobhouse as public moralist and ethical spokesperson by Mrs Steyn and her circles. In South Africa, Hobhouse was celebrated as a heroine, someone who had the moral courage to oppose her own country's actions, and endorse Boer victimhood. This cocuration of Hobhouse's auto/biography occurred in the re-publication and translation of the testimony of Boer women who had lived through the South African War. Mrs Steyn's daughter Gladys, for example, oversaw the publication of Hobhouse's War Without Glamour in 1927, and later facilitated the Afrikaans-language publication of Tant' Alie of Transvaal. 70 Hobhouse continually attempted to live up to the gratitude paid to her by recipients of her relief in the war, resulting in a symbiotic performance of gift-giving and mutual expressions of gratitude. In a reciprocal ethics of recognition, Hobhouse's humanitarian auto/biography was constantly re-inscribed, and the war and concentration camps assumed a foundational status in the auto/biography of the Afrikaner peoplea narrative fostered and nurtured primarily by Boer women, and endorsed and sanctified by Hobhouse. Much of this took place via her (epistolary) relationship with Mrs Steyn, though it was also performed in her publication of Boer women's accounts, and the investment of Mrs Steyn's circles in buying, distributing and publicising these. 71 This ethics of recognition was highly situational: Hobhouse viewed these accounts as peace testimonies and evidence of the subjection of women in war; for Boer women, they testified primarily to a sense of indignation at a racial order perceived to be overturned by the war, and endorsed an affronted and embittered Republican sentiment (and an incipient proto-nationalism). 72 Hobhouse's own 'value-laden frame of humanitarian witnessing' elided expressions of Boer women's bellicosity, privileged elite Boer women as witnesses, especially the wives of church ministers and local magistrates, and neglected the presence of Boer men and Black people in the concentration system. 73 Deemed as neither freeborn people nor yet worthy of independence, Hobhouse did not recognise Black people as fellow subjects of a political and moral injustice, but treated them rather as curious and incidental presences in an imperialist war against a victim nation.
Amongst her letters to her Aunt Mary Hobhouse in 1903 in which Hobhouse recollected meeting many Boer families rendered destitute by the war, there exists a rare example of a description of her meeting a Zulu man. Mr Alexander Tschwangtwe, 'an evangelist', had knocked on the backdoor of her hosts, a Boer clergyman family, who 'spoke very highly of him as a man of very devoted life'. Presumably aware of Hobhouse's work in distributing relief and collecting accounts of hardship, Mr Tschwangtwe asked her to survey the destruction in his district. She commented that he 'said he had heard the English missis had come to look at the ruins & the poverty of the land & he came to ask if I would not come & see the ruined location church & school & huts all gone & how hard his people had it too'. Mr Tschwangtwe also recounted his wartime experiences to Hobhouse of being deported to Natal and witnessing 'from 30 to 50' deaths a day at '[one] of the great black camps near Harrismith'. Ending her recollection of this encounter, Hobhouse commented 'I liked him very much. But this is a digression'. 74 In spite of Mr Tschwangtwe's appeal to Hobhouse's authority as a witness to wartime suffering, neither this nor any other account of Black experiences of the war or of post-war distress appeared in any of her publications. Where Black people do appear in Hobhouse's publications of Boer women's testimonies, this is generally as embodiments of the 'black peril' who violated the sexual, racial and economic order. 75 Hobhouse's collection and deployment of Boer women's accounts as stories of suffering and victimisation was taken up as a potent trope by emergent Afrikaner women's groups in South Africa, for whom the Afrikaner nation would redeem the suffering of its people (from British imperial aggression, but also from the threat of Black independence).
Hobhouse's humanitarian auto/biography was not constructed single-handedly then, but was co-produced through her South African relationships and networks, and particularly through her epistolary friendship with Mrs Steyn. It was in South Africa that Hobhouse's life story gained traction, and where she was taken up as a totemic figure in the history of the Afrikaner people. Though her primary South African correspondence was with Mrs Steyn, Hobhouse received letters from many South African women who had been recipients of her aid during the war, or who had worked in local wartime relief committees alongside her, and many of these letters were saved for her personal archive. Marie Koopmans de Wet, a wealthy Cape Town woman who played an active role in wartime relief for Boer women, wrote to Hobhouse the day after peace was declared after the South African War, Florence Nightingale did much for her Country when she went out to assist her soldiers and shew [sic] them sympathy. History will, -when the fever of the present is over, -tell English girls of Emily Hobhouse, who went for the love of England, to sooth and make bearable suffering, which ought never to have been caused. Wait, my sister, for your due. I am thankful to say, we in Africa understand you better in this, than your English people -but the day will come that the scales will fall from many eyes and then your satisfaction will be there -that you loved your country well enough, to force your help upon her, even when some did not recognise your motif [sic]. 76 In a similar vein, Mrs Steyn wrote to Hobhouse in 1904, commenting, You can rest assured Miss Hobhouse that there is no name more dear to the south African hearts than yours. We constantly receive letters in which they write of your work with the greatest love. Just to give you an instance my dear old father wrote to me before he had even met you 'Miss Hobhouse has been an angel of light to our people'. 77 Later still, Hobhouse received a letter from Johanna Osborne, who ran the Lace School Hobhouse had set up in South Africa in 1908, in which she remarked, 'My wish is that you will for many years to come enjoy the view from your little house in Cornwall that we South Africans are giving you with so much love & appreciation. . . My little daughter will know all about St Emily when she is old enough'. 78 By this time, Mrs Steyn had arranged for a collection of money from her circles in South Africa, which was given to Hobhouse to buy a house (the Warren House in St Ives, Cornwall), and women who had been recipients of Hobhouse's aid during the war sent her annual 'Wonder Boxes' of local produce and homemade preserves as an ongoing expression of their appreciation.
Nonetheless, the gratitude of the Boer people also weighed on Hobhouse as she sought to discharge the burden of responsibility she felt to them as a people wronged. During her 1903 post-war tour of South Africa, Hobhouse commented in a letter to her Aunt Mary on a reception held for her in Johannesburg where she was feted in speeches, and where she was presented with the gift of 'a beautiful karross or carriage rug as we should call itmade from the costly skins of the silver jackal', adding, 'I see no way of "living up to" this rug'. 79 This was Hobhouse's first visit to South Africa since her deportation at the end of 1901, and as she travelled around the country she was welcomed at railway stations, and presented with flowers and other tokens of gratitude from those who had benefitted from her wartime relief work. As we have suggested, Hobhouse's experiences in the South African war formed the foundations of her identity as a humanitarian activist and relief worker, and in her mind, this bound her together with Boer women in perpetual emotional solidarity, 'It was my privilege to share with you one of those supreme moments which test character and strike too deeply into the heart and mind ever to be effaced -we do not think of it now, but it is always there; a great formative fact in our lives which, as you say, has bound us in one'. 80 In 1923, she wrote to Mrs Steyn of her struggles to complete her memoir and the manuscript for War Without Glamour, and her sense of these writings as the fulfilment of a moral obligation, What matters the individual so long as the general sum & soul of humanity move on and up! What difference whether my last breath is drawn this week, this year of 5 years' hence? I am neither mother nor grandmother and belong to no one. I sometimes think the only thing that binds me to Earth is to finish up these books for you all. At any rate after that, I do not intend to take up more work of a 'Duty' nature that has behind it the driving force of a 'must', but work only of a kind my nature more specially turns to and which has been ever pushed aside by humanitarian claims. That would be very soothing in the last years of my life. 81 Accounting for the long gestation of her memoir, Hobhouse explained that she had been preoccupied with housework, hosting visitors, and the correspondence required to keep up her German relief work, 'Consequently original writing is impossible and I feel unsatisfied because I feel it is what I ought to do to justify my existence'. 82 For Hobhouse, completing her 'original writing' was a fulfilment of her duty to set the suffering of the Boer women on record, and itself therefore a humanitarian act. We see this as a further iteration of the 'formative fact' Hobhouse referred to in her 1911 letter to Boer women. In contrast to Stanley's argument that by the time she was penning her memoir in the 1920s, Hobhouse felt that 'people should let go of the past' in South Africa, we see Hobhouse's sense of her own humanitarian selfhood as too closely bound up in this 'past' to ever allow for its 'letting go'. 83 For Hobhouse, as for the Boer women with whom she expresses solidarity, testimonies of war and memoir-writing were acts of memory, but they were not 'past'.
Hobhouse's biography was increasingly taken up in the manufacture of Afrikaner nationalist history in the 1930s. Key figures in women's proto-nationalist circles recognised the powerful moral claims of women's wartime testimonies, and Hobhouse's method of collecting and publishing women's first-hand accounts of the war and concentration camps was borrowed by women such as Elizabeth Murray Neethling and M. M. Postma, whose collections of women's accounts strongly foregrounded suffering womanhood as a central theme, and acted as a lynchpin in Afrikaner claims to victimhood and persecution upon which rested their calls for political unity and mobilisation. 84 The amalgamation of Hobhouse's auto/biography into the auto/biography of the Afrikaner people is exemplified in the 1939 publication of an Afrikaans translation of Tant' Alie of Transvaal. The volume is prefaced by a foreword entitled, 'Boodskap Van Mevrou President Steyn' [Message from Mrs President Steyn], in which she explains, Miss Hobhouse received the manuscript into her own hands years ago and immediately appreciated the historical value of this simple yet touching story of a Boer woman during the Second Freedom War, as well as its significance from a general human perspective. She thus also personally facilitated a translation, wherein she tried her best to convey Tant Alie's powerful simplicity. I would also here like to praise Emily Hobhouse for this deed. [. . .] I want to strongly recommend our young generation to read this book. It testifies to the love of a nation and acute observation of a true Boer woman and Afrikaner mother. 85 Here Hobhouse's name is invoked for her recognition of the historical value of Alie Badenhorst's account and of Boer suffering. However, while Hobhouse had originally edited and published the book to show how one woman's wartime suffering could be redeemed through Boer women's contribution to white South Africans' political independence and reconciliation, by 1939 it had been repurposed and pressed into the service of an ardent and racially divisive nationalism, praised for exhibiting 'love of nation', and Alie Badenhorst herself repackaged as an 'Afrikaner mother'.

Conclusion
We might tend to treat humanitarian auto/biography as a reflection of the self, the tale of an awakened conscience or dissident troublemaker, a capturing of affective response relived in memory, or as a bearing of witness. Indeed, Hobhouse's existing biographical treatments either cast her as a loose cannon or an exemplar of moral fortitude. Here we have put the co-production of Hobhouse' auto/biography back in to its social, political and emotional context. We see emerge not a singular rogue self, but the social construction of humanitarian subjectivity, and the place of Hobhouse's emotional practices within moral economies of post-war feminist pacificism, and proto-nationalism in South Africa. 86 The very temporariness of the radical concurrence of humanitarian sympathy for the enemy civilian, post-war feminist pacifism and calls for Boer independence -the radical potential of this feminine political knowledge would not outlast the first few years of peace in the 1920s -should not mitigate against its importance, for it is precisely such historical specificity of emotional practice that constitutes the felt morality of humanitarianism at any one time. 87 Nor does this episodic approach preclude an analysis of power. Rather, as Boddice notes, analyses of moral economies reveal how 'political dynamics are embedded or sewn into quotidian practices'. 88 But it cautions against a connecting narrative of 'that which connects us to the past': humanitarian auto/ biography allows for a history of the self which treats narratives of self-realisation as 'emotives', and reminds us not to flatten either traditions of 'storytelling', or ascribe innate and ahistorical emotional responses. 89 This then was a specific genre of self-realisation dependent upon the very possibility of writing a biography of the self as awakened sympathy and make this meaningful, an ethics of recognition capable of creating affective bonds, and of rendering these as objective responses. Yet while Hobhouse claimed her authority to witness as a feminist practice, she was criticised for instrumentalising suffering for a political cause and elsewhere of being overly sentimental or 'hysterical'. 90 Thus while the tropes of humanitarian auto/biography are a familiar part of the emergence and persistence of a humanitarian ethics of liberal agency and 'social sympathy' in the late nineteenthcentury, this felt morality was not necessarily recognised as humanitarian by all, and became a contested marker of gender difference according to a persistent emotion/reason duality. Indeed, moral economies of suffering, and their affective gendered practices, were always plural: while Hobhouse's appeal to mobilise Boer women's suffering was part of a radical, but always partial, feminist politics of sympathy and resistance, the coproduction of Hobhouse's auto/biography in South Africa increasingly bound an ethos of suffering and its recognition into a strident ethnic-nationalism (and a conservative gender politics). Yet such differences in emotional practice, as Scheer notes, produce the very sources for explicating concepts of the (gendered) 'self, personal agency, and the moral values that flow from them'. 91 Notes 86. On the intersection of internationalism and nationalism see Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 87. On the discord between radical feminist pacifists and the Save the Children Fund, see Eichert

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
The research for this paper was supported the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/ M011119/1). This paper was originally presented at the 2018 ESSHC Conference in Belfast.