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If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening, and a weekly newsletter, sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
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This episode is brought to you by Spotify Portal for Backstage. But you're wondering, what's Portal? Well, it's an internal developer portal built to improve developer experience and boost productivity. All software componen components are centralized, documentation is automated and easy to maintain. New projects and components. Just a few clicks. With your best practices already built in, think less friction, more innovation. Ready to double your productivity? Try Spotify portal@backstage Spotify.com this episode is.
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E
Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita.
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A
Anand, and me, William Durumple.
- [02:24]
E
So we're doing this series on Empire and literature, and one of the things that's really striking, Willie, is actually bits of Empire that are completely absent from literature. And, you know, that's a real thing for you, isn't it?
- [02:37]
A
Well, not just bits. It's extraordinary because over the course of, you know, 300 years, the British kind of invaded almost everywhere. I've just checked, and There are only 22 countries in the world that the British didn't invade. So much so that freedom from British rule is the single most popular secular festival anywhere in the world. Every six days somewhere celebrates freedom from British rule.
- [02:58]
E
Independence Day.
- [02:59]
A
Independence Day. And yeah, if you look in British, you know, domestic English literature of the period, it's almost completely absent to a weird extent. Looking from our point of view in the present, there are hints of it in the back of Thackeray, the zm, Forster, there's a little bit of Kipling, echoes of it, you know, the background of Sherlock Holmes. But most novels of the period do not deal with it. There is a small body that do that and they're analyzed in post colonial literature classes. And it's extraordinary how little there is.
- [03:30]
E
I always think we're going to look at a specific period. It's sort of the cusp between the Georgian and Victorian era. And, you know, this is a time when greats, literary greats like Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte wrote. And if you've done English literature anywhere in the world, they will almost certainly have been on your curriculum. But what you don't get is the sense that they were writing at a time when slavery was one of the major drivers of the economy and also when the abolitionists were starting to really amplify their voices against it. Now, these are the connections we're going to explore in this episode. If you've listened to our slavery series, you'll know the Georgian period saw people like Wilberforce and Equiano, who was campaigning to end the transatlantic slave trade. But actually, just as William said, in the literature itself, it's kind of a background. It's almost like a passing landscape of big buildings and, you know, so and so's uncle is going off overseas to the Caribbean, but no explanation as to why so and so's uncle, with a very big house, is going to the Caribbean. So I think, William, shall we remind people who haven't listened to our slavery series, go back and listen, what have we been doing? But in a nutshell, just sum up what the Georgian era was like when it came to slavery.
- [04:44]
A
It's something that is not happening very clearly in Britain. It's something that's happening in the room next door. We're about to discover it does leak into Britain, but the great majority of enslaved people are kept out of sight in the Caribbean slave colonies. And Britain dominated the transatlantic slave trade, transporting millions of enslaved Africans to the Americas and the Caribbean as laborers for colonial plantations. And this participation generated immense wealth for the British Merchant classes and financiers funding the construction of whole cities like Bath and Liverpool, and cultural institutions like, I know the Bristol Old Vic. And the period also saw the rise, of course, of the abolitionist movement, partly driven by formerly enslaved people like Equiano. So, yes, go Back to episode 52 to listen to our series on transatlantic slavery.
- [05:42]
E
Yeah, I mean, although slavery was technically not allowed in England, it was practiced because you did see actually in sort of the, you know, the drawing rooms of England, servants from the West Indies, sometimes even branded and collared in Britain. You'll remember from, if you did hear our slavery series, that there was a 1772 case that prevented masters from forcing slaves out of England, but it didn't actually abolish slavery itself. That was the Slave Trade act of 1807. Then you had another act, sort of two waves of abolition, the Slavery abolition Act of 1833. So this is the backdrop against which giants of British literary establishment, the giants of British literary establishment wrote some of their most enduring works. And I want now, now we can introduce our guest who has been sagely nodding. Our very special guest today is the brilliant Miranda Kaufman, author of Black Tudors that was shortlisted for the 2018 Nayef Al Rohdan Prize and the Wolfson Prize. And now she's got this freshly baked Heiresses Marriage, Inheritance and Caribbean Slavery. And let me tell you, it is an absolute must read. It's so fascinating, so many stories I thought I knew about the period. And she's opened my eyes to so much more. Welcome, Miranda. Hello.
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D
Hello.
- [07:02]
E
Now, look, for the purposes of our podcast, you know, your book is called Heiresses. What is an heiress? How do you define what an heiress is for us?
- [07:11]
D
Well, I was looking at heiresses who had inherited wealth from enslavement and specifically plantation enslavements. So they were women who came from families who had plantations in the British Caribbean.
- [07:24]
E
How actively were they involved in managing the plantations?
- [07:28]
D
I think a lot of people just assume that women had no agency in these stories. But actually, the more I looked into it, the more we have some pretty active business women in the stories. You know, sometimes they would inherit the whole family estate, particularly when they were. Before they married and after their husbands died, they were pretty much in charge, you know, writing to attorneys on the plantations. And it's because they're absentee, because they're living in Britain, that we have all the evidence of these letters that they were sending back and forth with the men who were managing things for them on the ground. One woman writes a very detailed shopping list of all the supplies she wants sent out to the plantations. She says what they should be planting and not. And she puts in an order for more enslaved people and talks about what brands they should have put on them.
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E
One person I was really interested in, Mary Oswald. What can you tell us about Mary Oswald?
- [08:18]
D
So Mary is interesting because of all the women in my book, she spent the longest living in the Caribbean. So she's actually born in Scotland, but travels with her parents to Jamaica at the age of two and then lives there. Grows up in Kingston until she's about 20, when her father dies. And then she and her mother return to Scotland. And then she marries a Glasgow tobacco merchant called Richard Oswald. By that point, they're both in London. She has a £20,000 inheritance from her father's activities in Jamaica, which were predominantly mercantile, selling Jamaican sugar back to Britain and other products. But he does also have an investment. He's just started a plantation in Westmoreland, Jamaica, with one of his friends before he dies, and that ends up in a court case because everyone's always owing each other money in the British Caribbean. And she has properties in Kingston as well. But her assets allow him to buy into a slaving fort off the coast of Sierra Leone called Bance Island. That endeavor, with his business partners, they end up shipping 13,000 enslaved people across the Atlantic while the fort is active.
- [09:28]
A
Now, every Scot knows that Allawa is the home of Robbie Burns, and it's the setting for Tam o Shanta, which I had to learn as a boy. Tell us about the relationship of Mary to Robbie.
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D
Bur right. So they make all this money partly from slaving, and also when he gets the job, to supply the entire British army with bread in Germany during the Seven Years War. And again, her business skills sort of started in Kingston with her father, come to good use in Germany. She really is a key part of his operation in managing this thing. But once they get back from Germany, it's time to spend the money. And that's when her portrait by Zoffany gets commissioned.
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A
And my favourite thing about Zoffany, he's the only Royal Academician who was definitely a cannibal.
- [10:12]
D
Oh, my goodness.
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E
Explain.
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A
I'm not making this up. On his way back from India, he got shipwrecked on an island and had to eat one of the fellow survivors. Or rather, when he wasn't a fellow survivor, when the other guy died, Zoffali had to eat him. I would challenge any of our listeners to tell me the name of another cannibal who was a Royal Academician.
- [10:31]
E
I think you're on a winner there, Willy. Miranda, this does go into tangents on this podcast, and I apologise, but you were going to tell us. Connection between Aloha's famous son, Robbie Burns, you know, Scotland's national poet, for those who don't know, and William at the drop of a hat. And we're not. Nobody drop a hat can quote.
- [10:50]
A
I was just about.
- [10:51]
E
Do not drop any hats. Can quote at enormous length. Quickly tell us, how did Robbie Burns have a connection with Mary Oswald?
- [11:01]
D
Yeah. So, William, do you know the. The Ode to Mrs. Oswald of OCN Crew?
- [11:05]
A
I can't say I do. That one has escaped me. Tell me about it.
- [11:08]
D
What a shame. What a shame. I don't believe that Burns and Mary Oswald ever met, but he was inspired to write a particularly, let's call it bitchy poem about her.
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E
Am I allowed to say anything you like?
- [11:21]
A
He did. He did. Good. Scurrilous.
- [11:23]
D
I think the word I used in the text was vituperative. Vituperative. Poem about her because of this bizarrely colorful incident. So she and Richard had bought a big estate in Ayrshire called Ochencrue, but she died in London, but she wanted to be buried next to Richard in Scotland. And so there was this large funeral cortege, a group of men who transported her body all the way from Westminster to Ayrshire to St Quiver's where she was buried. It arrived in Sancur late at night and the innkeeper only had one person staying, but he chucked him out to accommodate this large bunch of wealthy Londoners. And the guy who got chucked out was Robbie Burns.
- [12:05]
A
So he's not someone to take that lying down? No, absolutely.
- [12:08]
D
He's already started a friendly bowl of tobacco with his hosts. It's a January storm and he has to travel on to the next inn on his horse, Pegasus, who is not as kind of romantic as the name seems, because from his other poems we know that he's a slipshod horse who has a tendency to sort of fart. You can always smell, he says. You can always smell shit when you get on Pegasus. The next inn is sort of like, you know, not a long drive today, but on a horse in a storm before the big roads have been built. It takes him ages, and it's freezing cold and windy and rainy, and so he starts composing this poem to Mary in his head. And when he gets to the next inn, he sits down and as his sinews are thawing, kind of this thing. But he did, you know, he had heard of her. Cause he did grow up in the area where they had the estate. So he may well have heard about her through her tenants and servants, but he just says she's going to hell, essentially.
- [13:11]
E
What for making him cold and wet and making Pegasus fart all the way to the next inn. She's going to hell.
- [13:15]
D
Yeah, basically.
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E
So, I mean, just, just one interesting little vignette about, you know, Mary and her husband Richard. I mean they, they had enormous standing because Mary entertained American delegates at the end of the Revolutionary War. I mean, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, John Jay all sat at her table. And didn't Richard have a hand negotiating the final peace treaty with the Americans?
- [13:40]
D
Yeah, exactly. Well, he was the main British commissioner who was sent out to Paris to negotiate the Treaty of Paris.
- [13:47]
A
We dealt with him in our Franklin episode. We dealt with him, yeah.
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D
And he ends up coming home from Paris for two portraits of Franklin and a lot of other art. He had 28 chests of pictures and prints that he brought back from Paris. But Mary sent out tea to Paris for them to drink while they were negotiating the piece. But it's funny, whenever I see kind of American documentaries about the revolution, they're always just saying and the British, the British. But they never bother mentioning him by name.
- [14:15]
A
And Burns, of course himself very nearly went out to the Caribbean, didn't he? Was gonna get a job in the customs. It was only a happen chance that he didn't.
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E
Well, I thought it was as an actual driver. I mean, I thought it was more hands on than that. It was something awful that he was applying for a job to, you know, sort of take the cudgel up, wasn't it?
- [14:31]
D
Yeah. Well, he described it would have been a negro driver is what he said.
- [14:35]
E
The other heiress I wanted to talk about before we get into our authors and they will be Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, I promise you is Frances DL. Now she is really interesting because she has mixed heritage. Is that right?
- [14:50]
D
Yes, she's actually the one I mentioned earlier who with the shopping list and ordering the brand for the enslaved people. Her grandmother was an enslaved African. Her mother was born enslaved but then later freed. They're in Kingston, Jamaica again, but she ends up moving to England, meeting her husband in Bath and he is the son of a Scottish earl.
- [15:15]
E
As a mixed heritage woman, did people accept her, you know, in England? I mean, you know, sort of really bluntly, was her skin colour an impediment to her place in society?
- [15:24]
D
Well, she ends up at court she goes to, you know, George II's birthday party. I think that it was quite hard, it was irritating because I was trying to find a few more like clear examples of prejudice in the archive, but there wasn't as much as you might expect. His parents are not particularly happy when they find out that they're engaged. But there are several reasons. They might equally have been annoyed that she was of illegitimate birth or that she was a merchant's daughter.
- [15:54]
E
I want to talk about Jane Austen's auntie, Jane Cholmondeley. Now tell us about Jane Cholmondeley and tell us about, you know, their relationship.
- [16:01]
D
So Jane Cholmondeley, who I call Jenny in the book to distinguish her from Jane Austen, because I like to be on first name terms with my subjects. Jenny is born in Barbados to a Barbados family there. Her father's a lawyer in Bridgetown. But they later get a financial interest in an estate called Braces because her mother loans a lot of money to Edward Brace, Reverend Edward Brace, who set up that estate. But she, like, like Frances and many of the other women in my book, is sent to England for school. Around the age of six, she marries James Lee Perrott. James Lee Perrott was the brother of Cassandra lee, who becomes Mrs. George Austen. So Jane Austen's mother. And by the time Jane Austen is grown up, Jennie is her only kind of living. So she refers to her as my aunt in her letters. You know, she knew her pretty well. She didn't like her very much.
- [16:58]
E
How do we know she didn't like her? I mean, does she appear in caricature in the novels?
- [17:03]
D
I mean, there's the more explicit evidence of her letters where she complains about her complaining. I mean, she's stingy, she won't spend any money. She definitely doesn't want to give any to the Austens who really need it. She complains about being deaf or she's worried that her house in Bath is going to be broken into. I mean, she's just this constant unhappy with her lot, despite the fact that she's got everything she could possibly need.
- [17:25]
A
I think there's also a relationship with the East India Company. One of Jane Austen's cousins was married to Warren Hastings and I've been to her grave outside Moshidabad.
- [17:34]
E
Gosh, the spread of this family is interesting. But also what's interesting is, you know, with this aunt that she doesn't like, who's stingy and doesn't help her family, she does give her one gift. I mean, she gives her sort of a roof over her head. At one point, Jane does spend some time with her and she begins writing Northanger Abbey, which is, you know, sort of one of her well known novels, under the roof of Jane Cholmondeley.
- [17:59]
D
Yeah. So Jane and James Lee Perrott have a house in Bath. Their main house is in Berkshire and a place called Scarlets. So Jane Austen's first visit to Bath, she goes to stay with her aunt and uncle and she starts writing Susan, that is later published as Northanger Abbey. And interestingly, in Northanger Abbey you have a young girl going to Bath and staying with a Mr. And Mrs. Allen, who are also childless. And Mrs. Allen is also, you know, a bit of a.
- [18:28]
E
Well, she's ghastly. Yeah, she's kind of ghastly is what.
- [18:31]
D
She is, isn't she? So Mrs. Allen is one of the characters in Austen's novels that scholars have identified as potentially being partly inspired by Jenny by Jane Lee Perrott.
- [18:42]
A
I got a little quote about a description of Bath at this period from Smollett, which I'm longing to read out, sent to me by my sister in law when I told her what I was doing today. And this, it's a, it's a wonderful quote. If you ever want to have romanticized ideas about Bath via Bridgerton, look at the reality of Smollett. He says, imagine to yourself a high exalted essence of mingled odors arising from putrid gums, impostulated lungs, sour flatulences, rank armpits, sweating feet, running sores and issues, plasters, ointments and embrocations, hungry water, spirits of lavender, asphodel drops, musk, hartshorn and salvatai is the fragrant ether we breathe in the plight assemblies of Bath.
- [19:31]
E
I mean, that's so disgusting. Can I just make two observations? One is that your family WhatsApp group is really weird. And number two, I just, you know, sort of this vision of people going, taking the waters of Bath, going in fairly okay and coming out with suppurating gonorrhea. I mean, it just sounds horrendous. But thank you, thank you for sharing.
- [19:52]
A
I like that.
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D
There's another Smollett quote from Humphrey Clinker where he complains that Bath is full of jumped up newly wealthy colonists from both the east and West Indies who are spending their wealth with no taste whatsoever. And it's particularly ironic because Tobias Smollett, of course, married a Jamaican heiress called Anne Lessells.
- [20:14]
A
Brilliant.
- [20:15]
D
So he's one of the many kind of writers and scientists in our history who were able to pursue their creative endeavors because they were bankrolled by money from. From heiresses.
- [20:28]
E
Oh, gosh. Just. I mean, the producers very correctly said not everybody will have read Jane Austen. And that's quite right. So, I mean, just, Just a little thumbnail sketch for you. She's the daughter of a country clergyman and that comes out sort of very much in her books because all of her heroines are sort of slightly, slightly poverty stricken and looking for a better circumstance. She grows up in the English countryside. She's one of those sort of quiet people who's always in the corner of the room watching people and how they behave and sort of manners and ambitions and, you know, the behaviour of rural gentry is meat for her mill, if you like. And she's funny. She's a funny writer. She's, you know, sort of rebellious because women weren't meant to poke fun at men at the time and certainly not put it on paper when they did. She wrote anonymously. She produced classics like Pride and Prejudice. Like Emma, she has a deserved place in the pantheon of great British writers. But, Miranda, but, but, but there is a furious row that sort of rumbles around and. Are they called Janites or Austinites, the people who sort of worship at the altar of Jane Austen?
- [21:32]
A
You've had a few skirmishes in your time with them, haven't you, Miranda?
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D
No, I. I just sort of live in fear of having one because there are.
- [21:39]
E
Today's your lucky day, love.
- [21:41]
A
Maybe we could tell us about Jane Austen and slavery and why.
- [21:45]
D
Yeah, but I mean, I am also a bit of. Yeah, I'm not a Jane, but. Oh, gosh, I, you know, I do love the stories. The stories are fantastic. And, you know, I am of an age, I was a teenager when Colin Firth dived into that lake, which is not in the text, obviously. I love the stories. I do. Clueless is one of my favorite adaptations, which is based on Emma. But no, I mean, I think, as we've been saying, you know, Georgian society is so riddled with connections to Empire that it would be bizarre if Jane Austen was sort of untouched by that. And, I mean, there are just so many links between her and her social circle. You know, as you were saying, you had the Indian connection, William, through her cousin, as I recall it, you know, there was a bit of what I call a storm in a teacup. Literally. When I think back in 2020, the Jane Austen Museum said that they were going to talk about connections between Jane Austen and enslavement, but they, they kind of use what I would call a kind of weak link, because they were sort of talking about drinking tea and how, you know, we know the tea is from India or China and the sugar is from the Caribbean. And that kind of shows how the society was connected, which it was. But I think that there are so many stronger connections. So her father becomes a trustee of an estate in Antigua. And this was a family that Jane would have known well, because one of the sons of the family was actually being taught by her father as a child. Her sister Cassandra is engaged to a guy called Tom Fowle, who actually is killed when he goes out to Haiti. He went out as army chaplain and was killed in 1797 while the British were trying to take Haiti back after the Haitian Revolution and re. Enslave all the Haitians.
- [23:29]
E
Is this a time of Toussaint L'? Ouverture?
- [23:31]
D
The British see what's going on in Haiti and think they'll have a go at trying to take over the island because it's so fertile and was producing such an insane amount of sugar for the French. Those are just two examples. I mean, every. There are so many people that Jane Austen knew that had these links, but I think Jane Austen's aunt is the strongest.
- [23:51]
E
Does she have, you know, shoot it down as a conspiracy theory? Absolutely. But were there family members, close family members of hers? I'm talking about on a brother kind of closeness, who go out to the Caribbean? And might there be Austens who are mixed race in the Caribbean? Or is this, you know, is this something you've come across to this day?
- [24:10]
D
Well, I think the people who want to sort of put a better spin on all this talk about her brothers, as you know, because of their connections to abolition later on, as if that somehow affects her, even though it kind of happens after her death. But I met some people from Bermuda who began to put me in touch with people who are saying that they're descended from the Austen brothers and their sons while they were based in Bermuda. I am in correspondence with people who are saying that between two of Jane Austen's brothers and potentially their sons, who all served in the Navy and were based in Bermuda at some point or another, that between them they potentially fathered three children with. With black Bermudan women.
- [24:56]
E
And with all of those connections, with all of those possibilities, what is. Again, and I go back to William's initial point at the top of the podcast, it is extraordinary how little that Caribbean life is mentioned, or colours, and I use that word advisedly, the books, because you do have Mentions. I mean, Mansfield park is one of the most blatant mentions. You've got Fanny Price, who is the heroine sent to live with her rich uncle and aunt in Northamptonshire. And it does say very explicitly her uncle is a plantation owner in. In Antigua. So, you know, there's that, but not much more. And people have been deeply critical of that.
- [25:33]
A
It's very much souped up, isn't it, in the movie with Harold Pinter as the retired slave owner. And again, this was a controversy because they make much more of it in the movie than is actually there in the novel. It's there, but very, very briefly.
- [25:46]
E
Yeah, but I mean, but some people have just. You know, they're so hacked off with even that. I mean, people like Edward Said are absolutely scathing about Jane Austen. And in particular, he talks about Mansfield park and he says Antigua represents the colonies. And that actually sort of the Jane Austen way of talking about the colonies is a whitewash of what the colonies were. I'll quote a little bit. He says, you know, Austen's not a racist. He concedes, but he says, you know, everything we know about Austen and her values is at odds with the cruelty of slavery. A white, privileged, insensitive, complicit. He slams her mostly in this essay that he writes for not addressing any of it at all or even talking about it, sort of making it invisible.
- [26:32]
A
What I think, though, is that it kind of was invisible to somebody like Jane Austen. She would see, obviously, the proceeds of it in the scale of the houses of the rich people that are coming back, in the fact that her brothers were, you know, were being employed there. But the whole point, I think, was it was managed so that you didn't see the. The pain and the suffering and the enslavement and the whips and the shackles. It was something that was happening offstage. And that's why I think it doesn't appear more in the novels.
- [27:01]
E
But Edward Said has a different take on this. Edward Said that the novels by Austen and her contemporaries are willfully silent about colonial cruelty. They all know about it, but they're indifferent to it. And what he says was colonial writers like Kipling, Conrad, prepared for by Austen, Thackeray, Defoe, Scott and Dickens, saying, you know, that it is genuinely troubling to see how little Britain's great humanistic ideas stand in the way of accelerating imperial process.
- [27:31]
D
I would say that Austen dies in 1817. There is no way that she wouldn't have known about the cruelties of enslavement, given the whole abolition Campaign. And also she said she was in love with Thomas Clarkson as an author.
- [27:44]
E
Oh, really? Oh, really.
- [27:45]
D
I think actually Thomas Clarkson, you know, gets underwritten out of the story by Wilberforce's sons. So Thomas Clarkson, I think, is more of the hero of the story than Wilson.
- [27:55]
A
Explain who he is, Miranda, for those who don't know.
- [27:58]
D
So, yes. So Thomas Clarkson was one of the leading abolitionists. I think he should get more credit than Wilberforce. But I think Wilberforce Sons wrote the story. And so, you know, the victor writes the. Writes the story. But. So Thomas Clarkson was a young student at Cambridge and had to write an essay in Latin about subject of enslavement. In the process of researching it, he became an ardent abolitionist and then was a strong campaigner working with Wilberforce, going around the country. He wrote books about it. He went to Liverpool and interviewed sailors who'd worked on the slaving ships. He went around the country lecturing with a box of horrible instruments of torture and shackles and all of that. And he was a really key part of the campaign.
- [28:41]
E
Look, we're going to take a break now. Join us after the break where we tell you about a really extraordinary book that you probably haven't heard of. And we talk about Charlotte Bronte.
- [28:54]
A
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- [31:20]
B
This episode is brought to you by Netflix from the creator of Homeland. Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys star in the new Netflix series the Beast in Me as ruthless rivals whose shared darkness will set them on a collision course with fatal consequences. The Beast in Me is a riveting psychological character, cat and mouse story about guilt, justice and doubt. You will not want to miss this. The Beast in Me launches November 13, only on Netflix.
- [31:51]
A
Welcome back. Well, we're coming now to a novel whose title surprised me. A Woman of Color or the Woman of Color. I'd always thought that this was a kind of modern Americanism, and it's in fact here in front of me in wonderful 18th century type. Tell us about this novel, Miranda.
- [32:08]
D
So it's published in 1808, which is significant, I suppose, because it's the year after the parliamentary act to end the trafficking of enslaved Africans. And as you say, it's sort of. It's the topics you wish Austen had covered, but she didn't. So it's about a young woman called Olivia Fairfield, whose father is an enslaver in Jamaica and whose mother is an enslaved African. Her mother is enslaved by her father, but when her father dies, he promises her his whole fortune in the will, but only if she sails over to England and marries her cousin there. So she's in quite an awkward position. And when she gets to England, she faces horrific racism. Her cousin that she's meant to be marrying is just appalled at the sight of her. You know, another relative is just sort of serves her this big plate of rice, just rice at the meal. And so I thought that's what your sort of people used to be. There's a young child she meets who tries to start washing the dirt off her skin for her.
- [33:09]
A
Who wrote this? It's anonymous, isn't it?
- [33:11]
D
It's anonymous. It's anonymous. But I think that what's interesting, I suppose, is there's been discussion over who might have written it. But I think what's interesting is that my research and that of others shows that there were a number of women of mixed heritage living in England at the time, and therefore it could conceivably have been written by a woman of colour with that experience.
- [33:34]
A
So the kind of thing someone who wasn't a woman of colour would necessarily choose to write about, presumably.
- [33:39]
D
Well, I don't know about that. I mean, there's quite a lot of literature, you know, written by white people, imagining the experience of enslaved people. But the other interesting thing about it is it's still trying to. It's kind of that respectability politics almost that she has to be whiter than white. Literally, she has to be. So, you know, in the same way that Equiano's autobiography, he's really emphasizing his Christianity has to be so moral and so perfect to avoid offending the sensibilities of the white reader. And she also, right at the end, she goes back to Jamaica because inevitably it doesn't work out. And arguably all of these plots with mixed heritage areas, they often avoid a marriage with a white man in the end because the reader doesn't necessarily find that palatable. But she goes back to Jamaica, but not to free the enslaved people, but to educate them in the Christian religion.
- [34:30]
E
Right, so interesting. And the fact we don't know about it at all. Look, one book that we do know about and one author that we know a lot about is Charlotte Bronte. So just as a recap, she's actually born in 1816, the same year as a significant slave rebellion known as Boosa's Rebellion. Third of six Bronte children born on the windswept moors of Yorkshire village. The moors are the landscape of her literature as well. Her sister Emily wrote Wuthering Heights, where they moors quite a lot, and her other sister, Anne Bronte, wrote the Tenant of Wildfell Hall. So Charlotte was, you know, small, slight, sharp, intelligent, composed. You know, you see a portrait of her, she looks quite severe in it, thin lipped and severe. But her life was marked by loss. She loses her mother, she loses her two elder sisters, she goes very sort of inward. But her writing is explosive and ferocious. She's passionate and defies all Victorian expectations for women. And Jane Eyre I'm really interested in because, well, just Bronte in general, because the plantations, they figure even more in her work than they do in Jane Austen's work, who sort of lived through the most turbulent times and, you know, the most vocal abolition voices tell us A little bit about how these two.
- [35:51]
D
Things bisect when I set out to write about these Caribbean heiresses. And I think the most famous example from literature is Mrs. Rochester in Jane Eyre, the Mad Woman in the Attic. Jane Eyre is this again, this kind of potentially a bit more like the author, as you described, a sort of quiet, sort of. I don't know if the word mousey is a bit unfair, but you know, it's quite quiet, sort of sensible sort of character. And she falls in love with Mr. Rochester, but then discovers that he's already married, but he's kept his first wife in the attic, you know, and she's apparently gone mad. But she is a Jamaican heiress and it's the kind of classic story from my book, you know, that Mr. Rochester's father hears about this extremely wealthy heiress and sends him out to Jamaica to catch her. And she's got a fortune of £30,000 or something and he marries her quite quickly.
- [36:45]
A
And she's implicitly mixed race.
- [36:47]
E
It's suggested more than explicitly said, isn't it Miranda? It's sort of the wildness of her.
- [36:53]
D
I mean, all of those things are kind of all lumped in with sort of racial, racial prejudice, aren't they? They've characteristics. So it's never explicitly mentioned what her ethnicity is, but there are descriptions of sort of dark eyes and swollen lips and sort of a few things that some scholars have certainly kind of said that she, she could be. And it's something, it's something kind of like hanging over a lot of these women from the Caribbean is there was such a high incidence of relations between white men and women of color or of enslaved black women, ranging from kind of indiscriminate rape to sort of longer term relations with multiple children. That partly because there were so few white women living in the Caribbean, if you're somebody coming from the Caribbean, there's quite a strong likelihood that you might have some kind of African ancestry.
- [37:40]
A
I spent a year of my life going through East India Company Wales in the British Library looking for mixed race children and what happened to them in, in Britain. And the phrase that comes back over and over again is that the ones who get sent back are fair enough to escape detection. So these kids are being sent back and there was always everything depended on the slightest shade of their skin color that two completely different lives could happen. And I have this in my family. You have one generation of the kids. The daughter is too dark to escape detection. In my great, great great great grandfather's will, while the brothers are fair Enough to escape protection, get sent back to Scotland and, you know, shoot pheasants and play golf and all that kind of stuff.
- [38:21]
E
There's a long history across the empire of mixed race people hiding their heritage, passing. I mean, that's. That's the stuff even of, you know, American literature, you know, right up until the 60s, if you like. Those who can pass because they've got sort of lightest.
- [38:36]
A
Is that a phrase in American history?
- [38:38]
D
Yes.
- [38:38]
E
Who pass? Those who pass. Miranda, I wanted to talk about Wide Sargasso Sea, which is Jean Reese's sort of post colonial feminist reimagining of the Mad Woman in the Attic and her story. And that the COVID the most, you know, sort of iconic cover that people will remember is two young black girls who are on the COVID which sort of deeply suggests that the Mad Woman in the Attic is the product of, you know, enslaved people. People. Although even. Am I right in saying it's not sort of explicitly said, even in Jean Rees, that she is mixed race. Although she comes with, you know, the accent, she comes with the manners, she comes with everything else, like many of the heiresses that, you know, you've talked about, and therefore doesn't fit into society and is just too wild and too crazy and too, you know, sort of uncivilized for the British palette.
- [39:31]
D
Again, in the actual text, I think her father is English, but her mother's French, from Martinique, but born in Martinique. I like to think that the depiction in Wide Sargasso Sea is obviously a lot more sympathetic than in Bronte in Jane Eyre, you know, the first Mrs. Rochester is merely a kind of crazy impediment to the heroine's happiness and I think has no redeeming features, really, in the way she's portrayed. Whereas in Jean Reese obviously sort of complicates that. She had a Welsh. A Welsh name that I read, actually, until her teens, lived in Dominica in the Caribbean, which is interesting because it's one of the islands that had, you know, the strongest indigenous presence for a lot of its history, the native Kalinago people. So apparently the honeymoon island in White Sargasso Sea is sort of in. Inspired by Dominika. Even though they meet in Jamaica, they then go on their honeymoon to Dominika.
- [40:29]
A
I think she's explicitly described as Creole in the novel, which does imply mixed race.
- [40:36]
E
Well, yeah, I thought it did, but Miranda says it doesn't. That's really interesting. I thought Creole was explicitly mixed race, but you say no, no, no.
- [40:44]
D
So. Well, in the context that I've studied So creole literally just means born in the Caribbean, really.
- [40:51]
A
So like. Like the English, like in India, use the phrase Anglo Indian, which can have several different meanings at different times.
- [40:57]
D
And if you look at the lists of the registers of enslaved people, there's a column and it says, you know, creole or African, you know, so it's either they were born in Africa or they were born in the Caribbean. So, you know, Creole just means born in. Born in the Caribbean. I think it's interesting that in both. In both versions of. Of Bertha, of Mrs. Rochester, there's this strong connection drawn between the weather, you know, the climate in the Caribbean, the tempestuous sort of climate they're still suffering from today. I mean, these hurricanes keep coming, but, you know, and the potential personality of these women. I mean, the whole thing is utterly prejudiced and mixed up. I think it's important to say this is not realistic. You know, it's imaginative, it's gothic, but it's not true.
- [41:48]
E
We're running out of time. But I mean, just finally, again, I urge people to go and read Miranda's book. But this was, you know, you've touched on this before, a real trait where sort of slightly inadequate men. And, you know, Whitehall Gasoc certainly paints Mr. Rochester as an inadequate gaslighting man. But go off and they marry these very rich women from the Caribbean who then sort of, you know, basically fund often their political ambitions. And, you know, we've got legacies from that even around. I mean, if people were to wander around and see sort of the progeny of those unions, you know, Aston Villa Football Club is one such, isn't it?
- [42:28]
D
Well, Aston Villa Football Club was built in the gardens of Aston hall, which was the home for 40 years of the Barbados heiress. In chapter one of my book. So it has. The Holt end stand is named after the Holt family. And her name was Lady Sarah Holt, originally Sarah Newton, who inherited Newton Plantation in Barbados.
- [42:50]
E
Yeah, well, I mean, look, honestly, read Miranda's book, treat it as a guidebook and an eye opener to wandering around, even maybe your hometown. It's been such a pleasure to have you. Thank you very much indeed. Miranda Kaufman and her book Heiresses, which is out now.
- [43:03]
A
Thank you, Miranda.
- [43:04]
E
Yes.
- [43:04]
A
Amazing.
- [43:05]
E
Next time we're going to be talking about cartoons. That's what we're going to be talking about. And two, that, you know, we both kind of. Well, one I've grown up with, one you've very much grown up with.
- [43:15]
A
I love them both at different times, Asterix and Baba Baba the Elephant, which is both absolutely charming and to look at today, slightly horrifying, and both at the same time.
- [43:25]
E
It's going to be interesting because we sort of end up sort of challenging ourselves, really. So do join us for that. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan, and goodbye.
- [43:33]
A
From me, William Durample.