IT WAS evening in the jungle village of Shupanga, on the banks of the Zambezi, and Dr David Livingstone was at the bedside of a dying malaria victim, trying desperately to secure another soul for God.

If the bedside manner of the missionary and explorer was more emotional than usual, that night in April 1862, it was because the patient was his wife, Mary. She was barely breathing.

"My dearie, my dearie, you are going to leave me," he said tearfully to the woman who had twice accompanied him across the Kalahari while pregnant. "Are you resting in Jesus?"

Her only answer before she died was ambiguous. "She looked up towards heaven thoughtfully," Livingstone later told their youngest son, Oswald. "I think it meant yes."

A century-and-a-half later, the biographer Julie Davidson is tempted by a slightly different reading: "Could it be that, badgered beyond endurance, Mary simply rolled her eyes to the skies in the time-honoured manner of long-suffering wives everywhere?"

It is an irreverent moment in Davidson's travelogue-cum-biography Looking for Mrs Livingstone (Books, 23 November), but the author makes no apology for asking the question. As celebrations of this month's 200th anniversary of the birth of the world's most famous missionary get under way, she is determined that the real Mary Livingstone will finally emerge as more than "a whisper in the thunderclap of her husband's reputation".

History has not been kind to a woman whom male contemporaries mostly dismissed as unattractive, overweight, and "a queer piece of furniture". The few surviving photographs show a grim, unsmiling Victorian matron whose expression was not helped, in Davidson's conjecture, by a recurring facial paralysis, picked up after a stroke.

She left behind no journals, and very few letters - it is thought many were burned by her husband, or those seeking to protect his reputation after rumours of her depression and wavering faith towards the end of her short life.

Yet, by mixing the few established facts with some educated guesswork, and her own experience of Africa as a travel writer, Davidson has uncovered a figure every bit as heroic as her continent-crossing husband.

BORN in 1821 on her father's mission station at Kuruman, 800 miles north of Cape Town, Mary Moffat was well accustomed to life in the bush when she met and married Livingstone at the age of 24. The names of her pioneering parents still evoke reverence from many African Christians. Indeed, it was after listening to a lecture by Robert Moffat when he was on a tour of the UK that the young David first set his heart on Africa. He was there, waiting, when the Moffat family returned to Kuruman in 1843.

He was delivered to their eldest daughter by an "improbable cupid", Davidson found. In 1844, Livingstone was delayed on a mission trip by a large male lion that famously seized him by the shoulder and shook him "as a terrier does a rat" before it expired from gunshot wounds.

He survived with a fractured left humerus, and had to retreat to Kuruman to convalesce, where he courted and proposed to Mary in the garden, beneath a wild almond tree. They were married in 1845.

Livingstone described his wife somewhat unflatteringly as "a matter-of-fact lady, a little thick black-haired girl, sturdy, and all I want". Mary's verdict on her suitor is, as ever, unrecorded. Stephen Tomkins, the author of a new biography, David Livingstone: The unexplored story, suggests: "Mary's marriage choices in Kuruman were about as limited as they could possibly be, but she wanted someone who could take her away from all that - and going places was David's speciality."

DAVIDSON rejects the idea that it was simply an arranged missionary marriage, however. "The assumption of many men who have written about Mary is that she was lucky to get him," she says. "But they seem to have been genuinely in love."

She discerns moments of playfulness, and even "some joy and laughter" in their marriage, and the rate at which Mary fell pregnant certainly indicates a vigorous sex life. "Can you imagine the conditions - long days sweating in the sun, diarrhoea, fever - not exactly romantic," she says. "Yet they couldn't keep their hands off each other."

Beginning married missionary life on an outlying mission station at Mabotsa, the couple had three of their six children in three years, and moved house almost as frequently, each time going further into the interior.

OTHER STORIES

Where do you think you are?

Over the course of four years, the photographer Peter Marlow shot the interiors of every one of the 42 mainland Church of England cathedrals. The pictures are currently on exhibition in London.

George Seaver, another of Livingstone's biographers, says that Mary "had no choices, just situations". She met each one with impressive stoicism, as her husband's restless energy ended any settled period with a new quest for Christ.

It is a measure of her stamina that she became the first white woman to cross the Kalahari by ox cart - twice, in both cases pregnant, and with young children in tow. The first time she lost the baby a few weeks after her return; the second time Oswell (her fifth child) was born beneath the stars after the whole party became lost and nearly died of thirst.

Livingstone's mother-in-law, Mrs Moffat, was scandalised by the prospect of "a pregnant woman with three little children trailing about in the company of the other sex, through the wilds of Africa, among savage men and beasts". But what did Mary think?

FOR Davidson, reading the authorised biographies of Livingstone a century and a half later, the most infuriating thing was the sense that the woman he described as "my rib", "my heroine", "the best spoke in the wheel", was essentially a silent "phantom in her own story".

"How was it for her, giving birth in the bush - did she breastfeed?" Davidson asks, speaking to the Church Times near her home in Edinburgh. "All these things that are of interest to a woman today are simply never mentioned. I felt that this was a life that had never been properly written about."

David Livingstone, by contrast, loomed large and heroic in Davidson's Scottish childhood, not least because she lived close to Blantyre, the working-class mill-town where the missionary was brought up. "One of my earliest memories, at about five, was being taken to what was then called the David Livingstone Memorial Centre," she says, recalling vivid African tableaux, and a dusty old lion skin - but no mention of Mary.

Many decades later, as a travel writer, she was staying on an island in the lower Zambezi, when her guide happened to mention that Mary's grave was still being maintained further along the river. "As a journalist, I was immediately curious, and became obsessed with trying to find out more," she says. What she discovered about Mary made her angry. "I'm an archetypal '70s feminist; so, while I've got enough sense to realise that her life must be put into the context of Victorian values, I felt this sense of injustice at what today would seem totally outrageous treatment by her husband."

BUT what Mary feared more than any adventure Livingstone could inflict on her was life without him. Davidson goes as far as to suggest that Mary had an "emotional dependency" on him that was "almost pathological". And yet, of the nearly 18 years they were married, she spent only eight in his company. The most miserable period of exile began in 1852, when Livingstone sent her back, with the children, to live with his parents in Hamilton, Scotland.

"She was brave and resourceful in the bush, having children, making candles, clothes, dealing with the extreme hardship of the semi-wilderness," Davidson says. "But when she was deposited in a city, she was lost, adrift."

Over the next four years, she quarrelled with her in-laws, moved frequently between rented rooms, struggled financially, suffered from depression, and - if rumours are to be believed - developed a fondness for brandy.

While Livingstone navigated to open up the African interior, Britain was in intellectual turmoil. Darwin's theories were beginning to shake old certainties, and Mary seems also to have been asking questions of her faith - a potential disaster for a passionate Evangelical such as Livingstone.

When he returned, a hero, in 1856, fêted by Victorian society for crossing the continent, she begged that they would not be parted again. And, when he had finished writing his best-selling memoirs, he took her with him on his next expedition, in 1858, perhaps partly out of concern for her spiritual well-being.

But before the couple had even arrived at the Cape, Mary was pregnant again, and she diverted to Kuruman, where her last child, Anna-Mary, was born. Returning to her other children in Scotland, in 1859, she found comfortable rooms in Glasgow - and, Davidson be-lieves, some degree of individuality and independence.

"In her late 30s, she was just beginning to make a life for herself in Glasgow," she says. But Mary was also rumoured to be making indiscreet remarks about the lot of missionary wives, and David wrote, urging her to pray more. "He worried for her soul - but also worried for his reputation."

WHATEVER his motives, Livingstone sent for his wife again. In 1861, she set off for Africa for the last time. After an arduous journey by riverboat, they were joyfully reunited in the mosquito-ridden Zambezi delta, where Mary contracted acute malaria. Within weeks she was dead, aged just 41.

Was she "resting in Jesus" when she finally succumbed at Shupanga, lying on that bed made of tea chests, in a building that had once housed slaves? We may never know, Davidson says. But we do know that, for all his evident flaws as a family man, Livingstone was devastated by her death, "and he did become a humbler man as a result."

OTHER STORIES

School says: ‘You’re hired’

Education: Christian values underpin the success seen at St Marylebone School, London, the TV personality Margaret Mountford tells Margaret Holness.

More recently, Davidson was humbled, too, in a different way, when that tip-off from her travel guide finally led her to the resting place of Mary Livingstone - a dignified tomb amid a graveyard of modest headstones, and home-made wooden crosses, on the banks of the Zambezi.

On a tall headstone, disfigured by smoke, the inscription read: "Here repose the mortal remains of Mary Moffat, the beloved wife of Doctor Livingstone, in humble hope of a joyful resurrection by our Saviour Jesus Christ. She died in Shupanga House, 27th April 1862, aged 41 years."

"I felt quite breathless with the excitement of finally being there," Davidson recalls. She laid bright red blossoms as a tribute to the woman she so admired. "I'm not a Christian, so I didn't pray, but it was a very intense moment." Eventually, she hopes to promote the site in Mozambique as a tourist heritage site.

In the mean time, she is speaking at various events that celebrate the 200th anniversary of David Livingstone's birth, and hopes to raise the profile of the wife who lived in his shadow, and who supported him through conditions that most of us can barely imagine.

"She's a remarkable woman, whom history has at best marginalised, and at worst traduced," she says. "I just want to give her a voice."

Looking for Mrs Livingstone by Julie Davidson, is published by Saint Andrew Press at £24.99 (Church Times Bookshop special offer £19.99); 978-0-7152-0964-6.

David Livingstone: the unexplored story by Stephen Tomkins is published by Lion at £9.99 (Church Times Bookshop £8.99 - Use code CT618 ); 978-0-7459-5568-1.

Westminster Abbey will celebrate the bicentenary of David Livingstone with a wreath-laying in the nave at 6.30 p.m. on Tuesday 19 March.