Sanditon and Fictions of fiRacefl in the Abolition Era

1 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Hogarth Press, 1973), 113.2 Warren Roberts, Jane Austen and the French Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1979), 64.3 Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (London: Macmillan, 1987), 256, 258, and 262. See also Marilyn

Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 287; and John

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY F ICTION 18, no. 3 (Spring 2006) © ECF 0840-6286

The Silence of Miss Lambe:Sanditon and Fictions of “Race”

in the Abolition Era

Sara Salih

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen chose to ignore thedecisive historical events of her time. Where ... are the Napoleonic wars: the realcurrent of history? But history has many currents, and the social history of thelanded families, at that time in England, was among the most important.1

Although it would be difficult to argue that Sanditon (1817) is“historical” in any immediately obvious sense, it is nonetheless

clear that the social history of England is central to Jane Austen’s last,unfinished text. Critics appear to agree that the novel, which, asWarren Roberts points out, was written during a period of socialturbulence in England, reflects anxieties about the shift from onesocio-economic structure to another.2 Once a fishing village and agri-cultural community, Sanditon has been “perverted” into a resort, a“sandy town,” where the sea is an exploitable resource and invalidismis a social activity engaged in by characters who are “urban, rootless,irresponsible and self-indulgent.” As Tony Tanner puts it, “[Sanditonis] a little parable of change—supersession, supplanting, and substitu-tion.”3 These are certainly accurate characterizations, and yet the

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Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body: “The Picture of Health” (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1992), 219.

4 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), 111, 105, and 109.

majority of the novel’s commentators overlook what Edward Saidwould call its “geographical problematic,” the fact that the seasideresort is dependent on economic resources from outside—from otherareas of England, and, it seems, from England’s Caribbean colonies.I am referring to Miss Lambe, Austen’s only “brown” character—sobriefly invoked and so tantalizingly incomplete. Certainly, Miss Lambedoes not take up much of Sanditon’s eleven and a half chapters, andas my title suggests, she never utters a word. All the same, the char-acters’ allusions to the “West India” contingent, along with MissLambe’s presence in the text, certainly warrant closer critical atten-tion than they have hitherto received.

Analyses of Sanditon tend to focus on its local engagements withclass, morality, economics, and social change, but as Said points out(twice) in his by-now notorious reading of Mansfield Park, morality inAusten’s fictional world is inseparable from its local social basis (thisis Raymond Williams’s contention). The local social basis is highlydependent on “unnamed outside forces”—specifically, wealth derivedfrom plantations in the Caribbean.4 These forces are quite obvious inSanditon, where the characters’ reactions to the news that “a rich WestIndian [family]” is coming to town centre almost uniquely on the per-ceived economic benefits to the community. In this article, I want todwell on the valences of the novel’s references to “West Indians,”along with Austen’s brief description of the silent but eloquentlysuggestive figure of Miss Lambe. Sanditon’s geographical and spatialengagements are not invoked with anything like the specificity inMansfield Park (1814), but it is nonetheless possible to offer contextualreadings of the novel that will begin to open the broad expanse ofdomestic imperialist culture within which it situates itself. ReadingSanditon in the context of widespread contemporary cultural anxietiesabout “West Indians” (especially “brown” ones) both at home andabroad, as well as fictional expressions of these concerns, will yield amore precise sense of the meaning behind Miss Lambe’s appearancein the southern seaside town. I will draw from fictional and non-fictional sources in order to suggest some of the ideological para-digms available to Austen at the beginning of the nineteenth century.Once contextualized, it appears that, even in its unfinished state,

THE SILENCE OF MISS LAMBE 331

5 Elaine Jordan, “Jane Austen Goes to the Seaside: Sanditon, English Identity and the ‘WestIndian’ schoolgirl,” in The Postcolonial Jane Austen, ed. You-me Park and Rajeswari SunderRajan (London: Routledge, 2000), 50n7.

6 Similarly, in Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian (1771), Belcour’s “warmth of heart,”impulsiveness, and wealth contrast favourably with the “cold, contriving artificial country”(that is, England) to which he returns, although these qualities actually make him seemsimilar to the Carletons in Constantia Neville.

Sanditon departs from sentimentalized representations of “themulatto” woman by focusing on her economic role in a society wheremoney has superseded morality.

Unlike Elaine Jordan (one of the few critics who has tackled thesubject of Miss Lambe in any detail), I am not going to place thischaracter alongside what Jordan identifies as a small group ofnineteenth-century “mulatto” schoolgirls such as the tellingly namedMiss Swartz in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848) or Christal Manners inD.M. Craik’s Olive (1850).5 Instead, I think we will learn more aboutMiss Lambe by turning to her immediate and (frequently) taciturnfictional predecessors: the briefly invoked “mulatto girl of ten oreleven years old,” whose brutal punishment the “fair creolian”Marianne supervises in Charlotte Smith’s The Wanderings of Warwick(1794); “poor Jenny” in Elizabeth Helme’s The Farmer of InglewoodForest (1796), who is raped and subsequently dies, but never makes anappearance in the text; the rich Louisa Carleton in Helena Wells’sConstantia Neville; or, the West Indian (1800), who, along with herbrother Ned, signifies everything extravagant, immoral, and danger-ous about brown “West Indians,” but again is only spoken about by theother characters; and loquacious Savanna in Adeline Mowbray (1804),acquired by her mistress in lieu of a pineapple for her ailing lover,proves to be a dedicated (albeit “slavish”) servant. Pre-Abolition novelssuch as Wanderings and Farmer are concerned with the documentationof white Creole cruelty towards enslaved people of colour, whileConstantia is very much a defence of white West Indian virtue andpurity.6 By 1817, a decade after the British Parliament had abolishedthe import of slaves into British colonies, Austen satirizes some of theanxieties regarding West Indian returnees that are played out inearlier fictional texts such as Constantia, while she altogether elidesthe relations between white people and people of colour in theCaribbean—relations that would probably account for Miss Lambe’svery existence.

Placing Miss Lambe in the textual company of “brown” Creoles whofeature in non-fiction and prose-fiction texts of the Abolition era will

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7 Yet Felicity Nussbaum has noted the ways in which “black” femininity is “predictably alignedwith anomaly” in representations of this period. The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly,Race and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2003), 170.

8 Nussbaum, 217, 169. Plays featuring women of colour discussed by Nussbaum include MaryPix’s The Conquest of Spain (1705), William Congreve’s The Mourning Bride (1697), GeorgeColman the Younger’s The Africans; or, War, Love and Duty (1808), and Thomas Morton’sThe Slave (1816).

9 The phrase is used in Constantia Neville to describe the “mixed race” Carletons. HelenaWells, Constantia Neville; or, the West Indian, 3 vols. (London, 1800), 2:322. References areto this edition.

10 “Putting into discourse,” is Foucault’s phrase. The History of Sexuality Volume I: AnIntroduction (London: Penguin, 1978), 12.

yield insights into the significance of Austen’s representation of thischaracter—uncharacteristic in her fictional world perhaps, but by nomeans an altogether extraordinary figure in the period under dis-cussion.7 Women of colour are regularly represented in Abolition-eranovels, and although, as Felicity Nussbaum notes, “very few women ofcolour were represented in drama,” a handful of plays featured suchcharacters (always played by a white female actor in “racial drag” ofsome kind).8 The brown woman appeared more frequently in prosefiction, and in this article I will analyse novelistic representations inwhich the qualities and characteristics understood to belong to “AfricCreolian” women are routinely invoked: indolence, passion, luxury,feebleness of constitution, as well as devotion, generosity, warmth, andmaternity.9 These are the fictional routes Austen might have takenhad she developed Miss Lambe further: the vulgar, rich, over-indulged, and constitutionally weak “mulatto” (exactly what DianaParker is hoping for), or the mulatto (usually impoverished, and/orin service) as sentimental object.

The instability of eighteenth-century racial nomenclature—alreadyevident from what might seem to be an excessive use of inverted com-mas in this article—immediately throws into sharp relief some of theproblems that a twenty-first-century critic is likely to encounter whenattempting to theorize representations of “mixed women.” The factthat there is still no acceptable vocabulary with which to discuss the“mixed,” or in this context “brown,” subject without the use of in-verted commas, renders her a somewhat elusive figure, even as theperiod under discussion displays an obsessive “putting into discourse”of both “brown women” and, by implication, interracial sex (althoughthe latter is evoked, not directly represented).10 Critics and theoriststoday must choose between using unsatisfactory sanguinary terms


11 For the same reason, “mulatto” will not be used in a positive sense in this article; hence-forth, I will dispense with inverted commas when referring to mulattos, coloured/brown/mixed people, and Creoles.

12 Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century BritishCulture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 7–9.

13 Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies, 5 vols. (London,1794), 2:18.

14 See Gad J. Heuman, Between Black and White: Race, Politics and the Free Coloreds in Jamaica,1792–1865 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981), 16n12; Elsa V. Goveia, Slave Society in theBritish Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1965),215n5; and Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, Or, General Survey of the Antient and ModernState of That Island, 3 vols. (London, 1774), 2:261.

such as “mixed race” or “biracial,” which imply the contrastingexistence of “pure-blooded,” “mono-racial” people, or, on the otherhand, engaging a dubious and idiosyncratic spectrum of metaphorsthat express the perceived gradations of “skin tone.” I have placed“brown woman” within inverted commas to signal the term’s racistliteralism and chromatism, but this is not an attempt to reclaim thephrase for contemporary usage.11 In the period under discussion, thedescriptors applying to people of mixed origin were at least as multi-farious (or variegated) as they are now: encyclopedias, natural his-tories, and prose fictions routinely allotted gradations of “humanness”according to blood quantum and skin colour. As Roxann Wheeler haspointed out, the eighteenth century was notable for the new promi-nence accorded to skin colour, although she claims that conceptionsof race were elastic at this time, and it was not until the third quarterof the eighteenth century that skin colour emerged as the definingcomponent of racial identity.12 Discourses of skin and blood seem tobe coterminous and compatible, so that we find Bryan Edwards listing“samboes, mulattoes, quadroons and mestizes,” while also using theinclusive phrase “persons of mixed blood (usually termed People ofColour)” as an umbrella term for all the gradations of “brownness.”13

These racial classifications had important legal implications, since“musteefinos” (the children of mustees and whites) were legally whiteand enjoyed full civil rights.14

In contrast to such specificity, “Creole” applies to black, brown, andwhite people born in the Caribbean. The word is not an epidermaldesignator, since it refers primarily to location and nativity ratherthan skin tone and/or blood quantum. In the period under discus-sion, “West Indian” is used almost uniquely to describe inhabitants ofthe Caribbean who were of European origin or descent (this is the

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15 For example, in Wells’s Constantia Neville, Ned Carleton is described as “the young WestIndian” (2:301), while an acquaintance of Constantia dismisses her as “the proud WestIndian” (3:56). The novel’s subtitle (“the West Indian”) also refers to Constantia.

16 For a useful discussion of this question, see Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness,Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003), 11.

17 Jane Austen, Lady Susan/The Watsons/Sanditon, ed. Margaret Drabble (London: Penguin,1974), 176. References are to this edition.

second OED definition; the first refers to the aboriginal inhabitants ofthe Caribbean). In novels such as Constantia Neville and Sanditon,however, “West Indian” designates white people as well as people ofcolour, so the term is racially ambiguous, at least in some contexts.15

My intention is not to consolidate unwittingly an ongoing obsessionwith colour by adopting the term “brown women” here. Rather, I useit precisely because of its illuminating instability, its vague metaphor-icity, and for the ways it symptomatizes an increasing concern withskin colour in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. My focuson brown women is intended to contribute to discussions about theetiology of racism from the Abolition era onward, without suggestingthat the discursive genesis of constructions of “race” and “mixing” isin any way straightforward or teleological. Scrutinizing some of thecontinuities and discontinuities of late eighteenth- and early nine-teenth-century representations of mixed women might challenge thecomforting critical truism that “scientific” or “institutionalized” racismdid not really begin until the latter decades of the nineteenth century,post-“Indian mutiny” and Governor Eyre controversy.16 At the veryleast, a discussion of racial fictions (novels representing “race,” as wellas non-fictional texts where “race” is constructed and taxonomized)that acquired a degree of cultural currency during this period willprovide some critical contexts against which to read Sandition and itssilent “half mulatto.”

Approximately halfway through Sanditon, the busybody Diana Parkerwrites to tell her brother about the “rich West Indian [family]” thatshe is hoping to send from Surrey to the seaside town.17 This newsthrows the community into a flurry of speculation and erroneoussurmise, and the discussions that take place before Miss Lambe’sarrival provide a neat snapshot of contemporary attitudes towardsWest Indian returnees and their perceived place in gentry English


18 Tanner, 254; and Roberts, 62.

society. While Mr Parker fantasizes about the wealth that “the WestIndians” are expected to bring to Sanditon, the ill-educated LadyDenham worries that “the West-injines” and the “West Indy family”will raise prices by “scatter[ing] their money so freely” and “fancy[ing]themselves equal ... to [the] old country families” because of theirspending power (180). The energetic valetudinarian Diana Parkerassumes that the “West Indian” Mrs Griffiths (who is from Camberwellrather than the Caribbean) will be “as helpless and indolent, as wealthand a hot climate are apt to make us,” and she hopefully projects thatthe rest of the family will also be “helpless invalids” who require herservices (195). Austen’s twentieth-century critics are clearly correct tonote the Sanditonians’ obsession with leisure, consumption, andsickness, along with the novel’s expression of the corrosive effects ofcapitalism on social morals.18 In the end, the characters’ designs arepartly thwarted: only one “West-injine” comes to Sanditon in thecharge of Mrs Griffiths. This visitor is Miss Lambe, “a young WestIndian of large fortune” (the fact is reiterated) “in delicate health”(204). The only other information provided is that Miss Lambe is

beyond comparison the most important and precious [of Mrs Griffiths’s threecharges], as she paid in proportion to her fortune.—She was about seventeen,half mulatto, chilly and tender, had a maid of her own, was to have the bestroom in the lodgings, and was also of the first consequence in every plan of MrsGriffiths. (206)

The imprecision of contemporary terminology allows Austen to playa joke on the unsuspecting reader. Up until this point in the narra-tive, only the term “West Indian” (along with its various corruptionsby the ignorant Lady Denham) has been used to describe Miss Lambeand her non-existent family. Since, in this context, “West Indian” is anon-racial designator, the discussions preceding Miss Lambe’s arrivalwould not have prepared the reader for the introduction of a “halfmulatto,” chilly, tender, or otherwise. Editing Sanditon more than ahundred and fifty years later in 1975, Margaret Drabble certainlyseems to have been caught unawares. “I cannot help but comment onthe extraordinary effect of the phrase ‘half mulatto, chilly andtender,’” she remarks in an effusive endnote: “It is as though one hadentered into another world. Who would ever have thought that MissLambe would prove to be half mulatto? And yet Jane Austen states the

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19 Margaret Drabble, notes to Lady Susan/The Watsons/Sanditon, by Jane Austen, 221.20 Williams, 112, 117.21 Miss Lambe arrives in chap. 11; the novel cuts off halfway through chap. 12.

fact with the utmost calm. As for ‘chilly and tender,’ the words referpresumably to her state of health and response to the English climate,but if they were intended to describe her emotional nature, what aninteresting character she might have proved.”19 Drabble’s reaction isinstructive, for it highlights a critical tendency (dominant at least untilthe late 1970s, possibly into the early 1980s) to divorce broader socialand political concerns from the apparently self-enclosed communitiesthat Austen so succinctly describes. Perhaps Williams unwittinglyfostered this tendency when he drew his evocative picture of Cobbettriding around Northamptonshire witnessing “the conditions andpressures” that Austen was unable to see from within the park walls.20

But the “other world” Drabble evokes (presumably, she means theCaribbean, colonization, and plantation slavery) is not so “other” afterall, as Miss Lambe’s presence at the seaside town attests. UnlikeDrabble, no one in the novel expresses surprise or shock at MissLambe’s arrival. Lady Denham immediately begins to think of MissLambe as a potential wife for her nephew and a recipient of milk fromher milch-asses (207), and the novel ends too soon for the reader tolearn anything about the other characters’ reactions.21 The reader isleft wondering about the precise nature of Drabble’s “extraordinaryeffect,” nor is it clear why Austen’s characteristic calm is so remark-able. How should the author have delivered her description of thewealthy West Indian, whom we would now most probably call “mixedrace”? Is the figure of the brown woman in fiction of this time sounusual that it warrants Drabble’s rather overstated expressions ofsurprise? Why does Miss Lambe make an appearance in this text, andwhat kind of “interesting character” would she have proved?

As far as the novel itself goes, some of these questions will remainunanswered. Sanditon is incomplete (Austen was working on it be-tween January and March 1817; she died in July of that year): MissLambe makes no utterance, and Jane Austen’s only “mixed race” char-acter is consigned to eternal narrative silence. As I suggested above,Miss Lambe’s taciturnity is matched by what seems to be a conspiracyof critical silence surrounding her, as commentators either completelyignore her presence in the novel or gloss it with “colour-blind” non-chalance. On the other hand, two twentieth-century novelists, AnneTelscombe and Julia Barrett, have gamely fleshed out Miss Lambe’s


22 Anne Telscombe, Sanditon: Jane Austen and Another Lady (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975);Julia Barrett, Jane Austen’s Charlotte, Her Fragment of a Last Novel, Completed, by Julia Barrett(New York: M. Evans, 2000). For a discussion of Telscombe’s continuation, see Roger Sales,Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England (London: Routledge, 1994), 214–21.

23 Telscombe, 150.24 Long, 2:260.25 Edwards, 123. J.B. Moreton, West Indian Customs and Manners; Containing Strictures on the Soil,

Cultivation, Produce, Trade, Officers and Inhabitants (London, 1793), 123. Matthew Lewis,Journal of a West India Proprietor (1834; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 68.

26 It is highly unlikely that Miss Lambe’s mother was white.27 In contrast, OED cites 1595 as the earliest usage of “mulatto.” Like “quadroon,” the word

is derived from Spanish.

character using the few details that Austen provides. In both continu-ations, Miss Lambe is allotted a country of origin (Antigua in one,Barbados in the other), and in Telscombe’s version she is given a firstname (Adela) and a more prominent place in the narrative.22 All thesame, these continuations contain only fleeting references to MissLambe’s “race,” as though, like Drabble, both authors are nonplussedby the unexpected appearance of a brown woman in Austen’s whiteworld. Telscombe alludes only once to Miss Lambe’s “half-mulattoinheritance,” citing it along with delicate health and reticence as thecause of her shyness on social occasions.23 Here, to be “half-mulatto”is either a social illness or an economic benefit (or perhaps both).

In fact, “half mulatto” (adopted so unquestioningly by twentieth-century writers, critics, and editors) is highly specific, perhaps withoutprecedent. The phrase may indicate an awareness on Austen’s part ofcontemporary codifications of “race,” but the designator is not usedin any of the fictional or non-fictional sources I have consulted. InEdward Long’s The History of Jamaica (1774), the offspring of a whiteman and a “mulatta” is classified as a “terceron.”24 Edwards uses themore common epithet “quadroon,” as does Matthew Lewis, whereasJ.B. Moreton writes that “a Mestee ... is begot between a white and aMulatto.” In his schema, a quadroon is the child of a white and amestee.25 Not one of these commentators uses the term “half mulatto”to describe the child of a mulatto woman and a white man.26 Unsur-prisingly, no definition appears in OED for “half mulatto,” whereas“quadroon” is defined as “one who is the offspring of a white personand a mulatto; one who has a quarter of Negro blood” (the wordderives from the Spanish “cuarteron” and “cuarto,” meaning “onefourth”). OED cites Hans Sloane’s Voyage (1707) as the earliest sourceof “quadroon,” listing John Stedman, Thomas Jefferson, and RobertSouthey, among others, as contemporary users of the word.27

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28 For example, Edwards’s History is cited in Charlotte Smith’s The Wanderings of Warwick andMaria Edgeworth’s story “The Grateful Negro,” as well as Edgeworth’s Belinda. See Smith,The Wanderings of Warwick (London, 1794), and Edgeworth, “The Grateful Negro,” inPopular Tales, vol. 3 (London, 1806), 194; Edgeworth, Belinda, ed. Kathryn Kirkpatrick(1801; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 221.

29 David Nokes, Jane Austen (London: Fourth Estate, 1997), 155, 170. 30 For an account of the Haitian revolution, see Jan Rogozinski, A Brief History of the Caribbean.

From the Arawak and the Carib to the Present (New York: Penguin, 1999), 166–75. See alsoC.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1963;New York: Vintage Books, 1989).

31 Derek Walcott, Omeros (London: Faber, 1990), 25.

If there is little consensus about the correct terminology forCaribbean people of “mixed” origin, eighteenth-century writers andcommentators share what seems to be an inveterate obsession withtaxonomizing and tabulating “race.” Almost two decades beforeAusten began writing Sanditon, Abolition debates had given suchinvestigations into “human variety” greater impetus, and this politicalclimate undoubtedly accounts for the relative frequency with whichblack people, “brown people,” and white West Indians appear innovels of this period (1776–1817 for the purposes of this article).Mansfield Park and Sanditon post-date Abolition and abolitionism, andwhile no evidence exists to prove that Austen read well-known sourcessuch as Edwards’s History, she might have encountered pro- and anti-slavery discourse in the numerous Abolition-era texts that invoke ordescribe the Caribbean.28 Further, it is worth remembering thatAusten’s family had more than one “West India connection”: herbrother Frank served in the Caribbean in the mid-1790s during aperiod of widespread uprising and revolution in the region, andCassandra’s clergyman fiancé, Tom Fowle, accompanied his patron toSt Domingo (Saint-Domingue), where he died of yellow fever in1797.29 The revolution on Saint-Domingue, which began in 1788, wasinitiated by coloured freedmen who were demanding full legalequality with whites; the 1791–1803 slave revolt in Saint-Domingue,culminating in an independent Haiti in 1804, sent shock wavesthroughout Britain (Britain went to war against France in Saint-Domingue in 1793).30 Throughout the 1790s (indeed, throughout theeighteenth century), Britain, France, and Spain were at war in theregion, where they “helped [themselves] / to these green islands likeolives from a saucer,” as Derek Walcott puts it in Omeros.31 Even themost politically myopic writer would have found it difficult to remainunaware of these events. While Austen’s focus might have been


32 Williams, 117.

“internal and exclusive” as Williams suggests, or even deliberatelynarrow in its engagement with the broader cultural implications ofsocial activities such as, for example, tea drinking, it is clear that shehad some sense of the Caribbean’s social, cultural, and politicalimportance to life “at home.”32 Given that Austen’s time period wascharacterized by its heightened concern with “race” and slavery, itwould be strange if her fiction did not at least acknowledge—albeitindirectly—these debates. Far from the Caribbean representing“another world” to the sheltered English writer, repeated contactsbetween European plantation owners/travellers and Caribbeansubjects, along with a slew of publications detailing such contacts,brought these two putatively distant regions into close ideological andeconomic proximity. To contradict Williams then, I would suggestthat Austen was not in any sense protected by the park walls thatapparently separated her from the social realities witnessed byCobbett (and in Williams’s analysis, these realities are class- ratherthan race-based). The “historical affiliations” of Mansfield Park, how-ever subtle and unobtrusive, suggest a degree of colonial awareness onAusten’s part, as does the presence of a brown woman in Sanditon. Bymaking the necessary critical connections, these historical andpolitical currents may be brought to the fore.

In order to forge these links, the critic will have to go farther (but notmuch farther) afield than Austen’s novel. Even the most cursory sur-vey of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fictional texts willquickly reveal that Sanditon is a significant, but by no means isolated,example of a widespread and marked cultural ambivalence towardsthe brown woman. In these novels, abolitionist sympathies are liableto collide with an uneasy sense of the confusion and disruption thatare the anticipated consequences of encounters between white, black,and brown characters. It seems that a cultural (rather than legal) pro-hibition against racial “mixing” in England was taken for granted inthe last third of the eighteenth century, and it is likely that the veryabsence of legal measures against “intermixing” in Britain, along withthe tacit cultural acceptance of white plantation owners’ sexual rela-tions with women of colour in the Caribbean (the brown woman was

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33 The phrase “almost unnatural” is taken from Sarah Scott, The History of Sir George Ellison(1766; Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 139. The narrator describes Ellison’sdomestic arrangements in England thus: “Mr Ellison’s house contained also many childrenof inferior rank; his servants had intermarried, the blacks with blacks, the white servantswith those of their own colour; for though he promoted their marrying, he did not wishan union between those of different complexions, the connection appearing indelicate andalmost unnatural.”

34 Long, 2:329. Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) features a white Creole male character butno “brown” Creole women, so the novel will not be discussed in this article. Interestingly,Edgeworth censored the “miscegenation” plot in the 1810 edition of her novel: the blackmale servant Juba, who marries the white English Lucy in the first edition, is replaced bywhite “Jackson” in order to spare Edgeworth’s father’s “great delicacies and scruples ofconscience about encouraging such marriages.” Kirkpatrick, introduction to Belinda, byMaria Edgeworth, xxvii.

35 Long, 2:329.

typified as a mistress in numerous Abolition-era texts), renderedsexual relations and their consequences a source of high anxiety forwhite English writers. The brown woman is represented as anomalousbecause of her perceived social and racial indeterminacy, as well asthe notion that she is the “product” of black/white or brown/whitesexual contacts that horrify some eighteenth-century commentatorsand puzzle or fascinate others. Such constructions, along with thesexual availability and unrestraint that the brown woman is deemedto share with black women, position this “almost unnatural” figure asa cynosure of ambivalent erotic attraction for white men andwomen.33 Like Austen’s Miss Lambe, the brown women in the threenovels I will discuss—Elizabeth Helme’s The Farmer of Inglewood Forest;Or, An Affecting Portrait (1796), Helena Wells’s Constantia Neville; or, theWest Indian (1800), and Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray: The Mother andDaughter (1804)—are depicted in English rather than Caribbeanfictional settings, thus reflecting Long’s worries about the receptionof the “yellow brood” of Creole people in England.34 It may beprecisely because the “distinction[s] … between white and mixedcomplexions” are not “kept up” in England, as Long complains, thatnovelists return to the theme with relative frequency.35 The fictionalpresence of the brown woman in white society reflects a concern withthe sexual “intermixing” that has taken place in the Caribbean, alongwith the resultant social intermixing that seems to be given morelatitude in England (again, perhaps because of the absence of legalrestrictions). Close analysis of the brown women in the Helme, Wells,and Opie novels will return us to the silent but eloquently suggestivefigure of Miss Lambe. These texts are not the only ones from thisperiod featuring brown women, and I have selected them for


36 The British Library catalogue lists eight separate editions of Farmer between 1796 and 1878,while there are two first editions for Constantia Neville and Adeline Mowbray.

37 My notion of “racial danger” is indebted to Mary Douglas’s analyses of purity and sexualdanger: see “The Abominations of Leviticus,” in Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Conceptsof Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966), 42–58.

38 For the Creole woman of colour as a mediator between Britain and Jamaica, see CarolBarash, “The Character of Difference: The Creole Woman as Cultural Mediator inNarratives about Jamaica,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 23, no. 4 (1990): 406–24.

discussion here because they slightly predate Austen’s Sanditon,because at least one of them appears to have enjoyed a degree ofpopularity, and because their racialized modes of representation arehighly generic.36 In each novel, the brown woman’s presence affirmsa putatively “pure” white femininity while simultaneously constitutinga site of racial danger.37 Further, and importantly for anunderstanding of the taciturn Miss Lambe, two of the three novelsfeature “mulatto” characters who never speak or even make anappearance in the text, although, like Miss Lambe, the othercharacters speak extensively about them. The shadowy presences of“poor mulatto Jenny” in Farmer and the “Afric Creolian” LouisaCarleton in Constantia Neville demonstrate the differing literary usesof mulatto women in fiction of this period. One mode of repre-sentation casts the mulatto as a distanced and highly sentimentalizedfigure, a helpless victim who suffers abuse by her white master inJamaica; while in the other, the brown woman is a rich returneewhose wealth and socio-racial indeterminacy pose a threat to estab-lished English hierarchies. In contrast, the talkative mulatto in AdelineMowbray uses an exaggerated “Negro pidgin” that instantly marks heras “other.” Here, as in Farmer (and in Smith’s Wanderings), the mulattowoman is a sentimental object whose narrative function is to confirmwhite femininity and the humane exercise of white power. In eachnovel, the “other world” to which Drabble gestures so vaguely isrendered proximate by the brown woman, whose presence in Englandinvites—or even necessitates—comparisons between “here” and“there” (those “unnamed outside forces” again). The brown womanperforms a necessary function in narratives that seek to affirm racialbinaries, even as those binaries are simultaneously threatened by thebrown woman’s mediation between England and the Caribbean(indeed, by her very existence).38

The representation of the mulatto as a racially contrastive figure isperhaps most strikingly exemplified in Wells’s Constantia Neville, whereblack and brown people serve to highlight a dazzling white femininity,

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39 See, for example Lady Nugent’s Journal of her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805 (Kingston:Institute of Jamaica, 1966), 98, 52; William Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island ofJamaica (London, 1790), 52; Long, 2:271; Moreton, 107–20; Edwards, 2:13; and Wilson, 21.

which nonetheless requires affirmation because it is compromised byits “Creoleness.” The heroine, Constantia, is a white West Indian bornin Barbados. She accompanies her parents to England early in thenovel, and the reader learns that Constantia’s mother and fatherseparated her from all people of colour when she was growing up.These reassurances are accompanied by glowing descriptions of theheroine’s “coral lips and ivory teeth”: “though born under the influ-ence of a vertical sun, the roseate bloom on her cheek, and the fair-ness of her forehead, would have induced a painter to draw her as therepresentative of the blooming Hebe,” we are informed (1:70). Clear-ly, Constantia is not one of those white West Indians that numerouscommentators criticized for consorting too frequently with “negroes.”Her emphatically white, “feminine” purity is attributed to her segre-gated upbringing at the hands of her judicious parents, and for thisreason the heroine is also linguistically “pure”:

The pains taken to keep Constantia from the negroes (Mrs Neville always havingan Englishwoman in her nursery) added to the society in which she was per-mitted to mix in her father’s house, gave her at twelve years old a fluency ofspeech, and a correctness of language, which many of her seniors would havebeen proud to possess. (1:77)

This description would seem to constitute a direct response to

observations, such as Lady Nugent’s, that white Creoles who spend toomuch time with black/brown people are apt to be linguistically con-taminated by them and will acquire their “drawling, indolent” modeof speech.39 Mrs Neville clearly regards people of colour as a pollutinginfluence, and she is reluctant to stay in the Caribbean because “thehot weather, the musquitos, and the negroes were grievances that shecould not have borne” (1:77). The telling juxtaposition of “negroes”and “musquitos” as equally troublesome (also evoking racializednotions of contamination and disease) explains why later, as a youngadult in England without financial means or parental protection,Constantia refuses employment as the companion of the “Africcreolian” Ned Carleton and his sister Louisa. As in Sanditon, Wellsintroduces her brown characters in racially ambiguous terms, so thatlike the Sanditonians, both Constantia and the reader are likely toassume that the “West Indians” are white. However, in Wells’s novel


the effect is neither humorous nor ironic, and Constantia’s horror ondiscovering that her lawyer-friend Mr Lambton is offering to secureher a position as humble companion to brown people from theCaribbean is undoubtedly designed to accentuate the heroine’smorality and racialized righteousness.

The scene in which Constantia learns of the Carletons’ racial identitybears extensive quotation and analysis. At this point in the narrative,Constantia is alone, nearly penniless (her father has died, and hermother has returned to the Caribbean to sort out the family’s businessaffairs), and eager to find work. When Mr Lambton introduces thesubject of “the young Creole[s],” Constantia instantly assumes they arewhite: “May I ask how Miss Carleton has been suffered to remain solong in the West-Indies[?]” she asks with a touch of disapproval:

Except where an uncommon degree of attention is paid by parents, youngpersons of both sexes, who continue there after seven years old, run great riskof contamination from the negroes. The danger to females is, consequently, thegreatest. Did Mrs Carleton die before her husband? (2:320–21)

Clearly, Constantia does not understand that they are discussing awhite man who had a sexual relationship with a black or brownwoman; even when Mr Lambton informs her that the Carletons are“natural” children (their father was his relative), she fails to grasp thefull atrocity of their “mixed” identity:

“The style of living at Nevis must be very different then from what it was atBarbadoes; for in that island there was no instance of any resident having a whitemistress; all men of fortune, who were not married, had their brown women; butsuch connections were kept among domestics, the issue of them brought up asslaves, and not unfrequently sold on the death of the master of the estate. Wehave many Inkles and Yaricos in the Leeward Islands.” It is hardly possible to dojustice to the scene that followed, when the unsuspecting Constantia was in-formed, that Mr and Miss Carleton were the children of different slaves, theproperty of their father, whose will expressed this. By it he also bequeathedtrifling legacies to several others of his offspring, not any two of which who wereby the same woman; and what led her still more to execrate the memory of aman who could thus write, or cause to be written, a libel on himself, was his hav-ing left the paltry sum of five thousand pounds to a brother, a clergyman inDorsetshire, of small preferment, and considerable merit, who had two sons andfour daughters but slenderly provided for. (2:321–22) Contemporary racial attitudes are starkly revealed in this description

of Constantia’s dawning realization that Ned and Louisa are

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40 There were numerous versions of the Inkle and Yarico story from 1711, when it appearedin the Spectator, to the beginning of the nineteenth century. See English Trader, Indian Maid:Representing Gender, Race and Slavery in the New World; An Inkle and Yarico Reader, ed. FrankFelsenstein (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). Matthew Lewis comparestwo different women of colour to Yarico (46 and 98).

illegitimate, “mixed,” and rich. Here, she does not object to theCarletons’ legal illegitimacy but to their belonging to the “race” of“Inkles and Yaricos,” which she says populate the Leeward Islands.40

The literary allusion would suggest that Mr Carleton Senior desertedhis slave concubines, but at least he has acknowledged his “naturalchildren” in his will, leaving them, it may be presumed, more than the“paltry sum of five thousand pounds.” Later the same night,Constantia weeps when she recalls “the injunctions of her father, onno pretext to converse with mulattoes; they commonly possessed, inhis opinion, the predominant bad qualities of both Europeans andAfricans” (2:326). In Constantia Neville, these “bad qualities” includeextravagance, ostentation, and spendthriftiness, characteristics fre-quently attributed to both white and brown Creoles returning toEngland. Not only are Constantia Neville’s brown characters tainted bytheir black slave heritage, but (as in Sanditon) they risk upsetting theeconomic and social order through their overspending (significantly,the worthy white characters in Constantia Neville are relativelyimpoverished at this point).

If Constantia refuses to be bound to the Carletons by the cash nexus,and if the narrative is at pains to stress her virtuous white femininity byway of contrast to their generic “brown” West Indian ways, there arealso intriguing hints that the Carletons share certain features in com-mon with the heroine: Ned and Louisa also have “white blood” (theirfather’s), the sobriquet “West Indian” is used to describe all three char-acters, and the Carletons even share Mrs Neville’s pre-married name(2:317). To compound this commonality, a number of the novel’s whiteEnglish characters are suspicious of Constantia, clearly regarding heras more “West Indian” than “English” (1:70, 3:56). Constantia’s whitesuperiority is strongly affirmed in the end, but by reflecting contempor-ary concerns about the potential similarities between white and brownpeople, the novel raises the possibility that the differences betweenthem are not that great after all. Perhaps for this reason, these twosilent brown Creole characters are effectively quarantined from thewhite protagonist whose pure femininity is ultimately strengthened bycontrast with the absent “other.”


41 For a survey of sentimental anti-slavery literature, see Wylie Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings:British Anti-Slavery Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1942), 264–72.

42 Elizabeth Helme, The Farmer of Inglewood Forest; Or, An Affecting Portrait (1796; Manchester:J. Gleave, 1823), 386. References are to this edition.

Although the Carletons are absent presences in Constantia Neville,their generic “West Indian-ness” serves as a negative contrast with awhite Creole femininity that is strongly affirmed. The rich but vulgarmulatto would have been a familiar figure to eighteenth-century audi-ences and readers, as would her/his counterpart, the sentimentalizedmulatto.41 Half-sisters to the “noble negro” (the latter popularized inAphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Thomas Southerne’s long-running the-atrical adaptation of the novella), the mulatto women in The Farmer ofInglewood Forest and Adeline Mowbray are victims of poverty and distresswho are undoubtedly intended to arouse the reader’s pity. In Farmer,as in Sanditon and Constantia Neville, the mulatto woman is a marginalfigure, and she makes no utterance. Here, it is Julia, the black servantwoman—herself highly sentimentalized—who draws attention to theCaribbean contexts that repeatedly intrude upon the text’s Englishsetting. Formerly Fitzmorris’s slave on his Jamaican plantation, Julianow enjoys the status of a freewoman in England, although sheregards herself as bound to her white mistress, Anna. The latter isFitzmorris’s illegitimate daughter, although neither father nor daugh-ter is aware of this, and when Fitzmorris attempts to rape Anna, Juliareminds him of past crimes committed in Jamaica. “[P]oor mulattaJenny” was the Jamaican slave Fitzmorris bought, drugged, and rapedwith the help of a local surgeon, even as he now plans to drug andrape his own daughter. Conveniently enough, Jenny subsequentlydied: “Poor mulatto! You remember pretty Jenny, massa?” Julia asks:“massa use ill.”42 Fitzmorris does remember “the affair of the littlemulatto” as he calls it, but he is offhand when his valet mentions thesubject: “To be sure it was only a wench, and her death of little conse-quence” (396). In fact, Jenny’s death is of thematic consequence,even though it occurred in a distant place and within a differentnarrative time scheme. Julia’s insistent reminders invite a parallelbetween “poor mulatto Jenny” and white Anna, Fitzmorris’s nextintended victim. However, lest the proximity between the white andbrown women seems too uncomfortable, like the Carletons, Jenny is

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43 Smith’s Wanderings also features a mulatto woman victim, “a mulatto girl of ten or elevenyears old,” who is brutally flayed by two black women under the supervision of the “faircreolian” Marianne Shaftesbury (54).

44 Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray: The Mother and Daughter (1804; London: Pandora, 1986),140. References are to this edition. Similarly, Julia’s “colour” is never specified in Farmer.

carefully separated from the novel’s main plot (her story is narrated,not represented), and she is consigned to complete silence.43

In contrast to silent mulatto Jenny, Julia herself is extremelyloquacious. Her vehement exclamations mark her as “different” fromthe white characters, and these outbursts frequently contain allusionsto the black and brown people who haunt this novel (Jenny and Julia’sdead son, Scipio). Although Julia is a “negro” character, the functionshe fulfils in Farmer is identical to that of the mulatto woman Savannain Adeline Mowbray. In both texts, the woman of colour is marked as“other” through her register, and she paints a highly sentimentalizedpicture of the evils of slavery—evils that, although distanced from thenarrative, suggest obvious parallels with life “at home.” In Opie’snovel, Savanna protects her white mistress with ferocious maternity,and, like Julia, her broken English renders a racialized description ofher unnecessary. Her physical appearance is deemed to be of so littleimportance that Adeline has to remind herself of it shortly after theirfirst meeting: the reader is merely told that Savanna is “a mulattowoman, the picture of sickness and despair.”44 When Adelineencounters Savanna for the first time, the latter’s husband is beingdragged to jail for debt while a crowd gathers around her and her son,“a mulatto boy, known in Richmond by the name of the Tawny Boy”(140). Adeline only notices Savanna’s “race” when a member of the(white) crowd calls her “that ugly black toad!”:

Adeline till then had not recollected that [Savanna] was a mulatto; and thisspeech, reflecting so brutally on her colour,—a circumstance which made heran object of greater interest to Adeline,—urged her to step forward to their jointrelief with an almost irresistible impulse. (141)

Although Savanna has a name (presumably supposed to evokeSavannah del Mar in Jamaica), she is just as frequently referred to as“the mulatto” so that the reader, unlike Adeline, will not forget herracial “otherness.” The representations of Savanna and Julia arestrikingly similar: both women are or have been mothers, they arepassionately committed to the defence of their white mistresses, andthey vocalize their sentiments insistently (the subalterns in these two


45 See Edwards, 2:27, 29. Mary Louise Pratt identifies the “nurturing native” as a stock figurein sentimental travel writing. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (NewYork: Routledge, 1993), 96. Evidently the stereotype was long-lived: Julia and Savannamight well be prototypes for Rhys’s Christophine in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966).

46 Pratt, 86.47 Pratt, 86.48 Pratt, 97.49 Pratt, 97.

novels never stop speaking).45 These portrayals constitute what MaryLouise Pratt has called “sentimental dramatizations of the contactzone,” a feature of contemporary texts that had sex and slavery astheir major themes.46 In these narratives (a significant number ofwhich had been published by the end of the eighteenth century),conjugal love provides “an alternative to enslavement and colonialdomination, or as newly legitimated versions of them.”47 Although thenovels I am discussing do not centre around conjugality or “trans-racial love plots,” Pratt’s insights into the ideological function ofsentimental narratives shed light on the affective, sentimentalizedrelationships between white women and women of colour in Farmerand Adeline Mowbray. Pratt characterizes transracial love plots as“imaginings in which European supremacy is guaranteed by affectiveand social bonding”: sex replaces slavery, and romantic love ratherthan servitude or force guarantees the willing submission of thecolonized. “As an ideology, romantic love, like capitalist commerce,understands itself as reciprocal,” she writes.48 The relationshipsbetween Anna and Julia, Adeline and Savanna are not necessarilyromantic, but they are highly sentimentalized—perhaps even eroti-cized—so that the reader is undoubtedly supposed to regard them asvoluntary and mutual. In this sense, the relationships perform anidentical function to that of the transracial love plots that Prattdescribes. The sentimental bond between white woman and womanof colour legitimizes European supremacy (since it is based on affect)and “mystifies exploitation out of the picture.”49 The women of colourin Farmer and Adeline are not represented as slaves, but as passionateand willing protectors of a white femininity that is itself subject towhite male domination.

Significantly, both Savanna and Julia are introduced at points in thenarrative when proper white femininity is compromised or threat-ened. In Adeline Mowbray, the heroine is cohabiting out of wedlockwith Glenmurray when she encounters Savanna, while in Farmer, Annarequires Julia’s protection against the sexual depredations of the

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50 Nussbaum has pointed out that “such tales imagine miscegenation, but avoid grapplingwith its material consequences. “Women and Race: ‘a difference of complexion,’” in Womenand Literature in Britain 1700–1800, ed. Vivian Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2000), 76.

villainous Fitzmorris. The woman of colour deflects attention from awhite femininity that, as in Constantia, requires strengthening by con-trast to “difference” and “otherness.” Brown women serve as points ofcontrast and contact, bringing the putatively distant worlds of Englandand the Caribbean closer, and inviting precisely the kinds of parallelsbetween white and brown that the narratives are at pains to avoid. Soin Adeline, Savanna goes to Jamaica to nurse her ill husband (to whomshe is curiously un-devoted), and she returns with the news thatAdeline’s boorish husband Berrendale has married a beautiful “WestIndian heiress” (198, 201–3). Not only is Savanna an intermediarybetween “here” and “there,” but the nursing of her dying husband inJamaica mirrors Adeline’s earlier care of Glenmurray in England. InFarmer, we have seen that it is Julia who implicitly invites comparisonsbetween Anna and the poor raped mulatto who is instrumentallysilenced and sentimentalized. Ultimately, though, the parallel be-tween brown-woman-victim and white-woman-victim is retreated from,and all three of the novels represent the “products” (so to speak) ofinterracial sex, but never interracial sex itself.50 Although the brownwoman is crucial to these novels, she remains a figure of difference,sometimes horror, a racialized sentimental object rather than anindividualized subject.

Paying close attention to Abolition-era representations of brownwomen provides useful contexts for Austen’s Miss Lambe, as well assuggesting how the author might have developed this character hadshe lived longer. Of course, numerous lacunae remain, such as MissLambe’s country of origin, her parentage, and exactly how she comesto be at Mrs Griffiths’s genteel seminary. I have been assuming thatMiss Lambe was born somewhere in the Caribbean, since the sobri-quet “West Indian” is used so insistently by the other characters.Although the continuations of Sanditon assign Miss Lambe’s nationalidentity on a rather random basis, neither Antigua nor Barbados is far-fetched as a place of birth. On the other hand, Jamaica was morepopular as a setting in fictions of this period: nine out of the ten


51 The list includes, in chronological order: Scott, History; Sophia Lee, The Recess (1783–85);Anna Maria Mackenzie, Slavery: or, the Times (1792); Jane West, The Advantages of Education(1793); Smith, Wanderings; Helme, Farmer; Edgeworth, “The Good Aunt” (1801); Opie,Adeline Mowbray; Edgeworth, “The Grateful Negro” (1806).

52 Heuman, 7, 13; Goveia, 215–16. See also Edwards, 2:26; Mavis Campbell, The Dynamics ofChange in a Slave Society: A Sociopolitical History of the Free Coloureds of Jamaica, 1800–1865(Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1976), 50; and Sheena Boa, “Free Blackand Coloured Women in a White Man’s Slave Society, 1760–1834” (MPhil thesis, Universityof the West Indies, Mona, 1985), 48–49.

53 Heuman, 4; Goveia, 215–17.54 See also Campbell, 44–45.55 Campbell, 45.56 Cited in Boa, 68.

Abolition-era, female-authored novels I have studied closely makeextended mention of or are partly set in Jamaica, probably becauseJamaica was so frequently described in non-fictional sources, andbecause it occupied a prominent place in the contemporary Englishimagination.51 When Austen dipped into works by “sister novelists,”she may have come across references to or descriptions of Jamaica,but it is impossible to ascertain Miss Lambe’s country of birth, andAusten might have chosen to leave it indeterminate had she com-pleted the novel. Whatever her nationality, Miss Lambe is likely thedaughter or granddaughter of a white plantation owner and a mulattowoman (her mulatto mother was probably the illegitimate daughterof a “negro” slave). The “housekeeping” or concubinage systemwhereby every white man “kept” a black or brown mistress was widelyacknowledged and even countenanced in the British Caribbean, butvery few white men married women of colour during this period(although no law prohibited a white man from marrying his colouredmistress).52 The paucity of white women, along with the planters’preference for employing single (white) males, partly accounts for thecontinuation of the “housekeeping” system, which resulted in a rapidincrease in the brown population.53 Heuman speculates that in thethree decades after 1790 the Jamaican free coloured population morethan tripled, and that by the 1820s it surpassed the white population,while a similar population increase also occurred in the LeewardIslands.54 As Mavis Campbell points out, white planters in Jamaicareacted to this increase with “an excess of laws against theiroffspring.”55 An Inheritance Act was passed in 1761 “to prevent theinconveniences arising for exorbitant grants and devises made bywhite persons to negroes and the issue of negroes, and to restrain andlimit such grants and devises.”56 As a result of this act, people of

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57 See Heuman, 5–6; E.K. Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 170; and Campbell, 48. Deficiency law required that freecoloured landowners had to retain a certain number of whites on their estates inproportion to the numbers of slaves they owned.

58 Boa, 171.59 Boa, 174.60 See, for example, Long, 2:329; Moreton, 112.

colour could not inherit property worth more than £2000, anddeficiency legislation also made it difficult for people of colour tobecome landowners.57

Diana Parker is not a reliable source of information in the novel(she after all erroneously announces the arrival of a West Indianfamily, where none exists), but she does appear to be correct in herenthusiastic assertions of Miss Lambe’s “immense fortune” (195). Theseventeen-year-old has evidently been sent to Mrs Griffiths’s seminaryto “finish” her education prior to acquiring a husband, and we aretold that “she paid in proportion to her fortune” (206). If Miss Lambewere Jamaican, her receiving an English education would place her inthe company of a small group of “coloured” girls whose wealthy whitefathers sent them to school in England.58 Few coloured girls were edu-cated in this way, probably because many were illegitimate andtherefore not socially acknowledged by their white fathers (althoughthe latter often financially supported their “coloured” offspring).There were few private educational facilities for coloured girls, andmiddle-class schools in Kingston, Jamaica, were segregated until thenineteenth century. In contrast, mulatto and quadroon girls receivingtheir education in England could pass for white: some Creole-whiteswere darker than English people, and brown people were oftenmistaken for tanned white people (although those with dark skininvariably were subjected to racism).

As for what the future might have held for Miss Lambe: somecoloured girls did remain in England to marry white men, so LadyDenham’s idea of making a match between Miss Lambe and SirEdward Denham is not altogether out of the question.59 Indeed, it islikely that someone in Miss Lambe’s position would wish to remain inEngland. Contemporary commentators frequently record colouredwomen’s dissatisfaction and boredom on their return to the Carib-bean, where they were subject to extreme legal and social discrimina-tion.60 Coloured people could not attend the same social functions aswhites; they could not enter the theatre by the same door; and therewere separate pews for white people in the Anglican Church. There


61 Heuman, 11–12; Brathwaite, 186–87; Campbell, 44; Goveia, 218.62 Said claims that “it would be silly to expect Jane Austen to treat slavery with anything like

the passion of an abolitionist or a newly liberated slave” (115), but Jordan cites the letterin which Austen claims to have been “in love” with Thomas Clarkson as evidence that “JaneAusten was opposed to slavery on principle” (39, 51n19). Yet Jordan also points out thatAusten’s statement (made in a letter to Cassandra in January 1813) is “subsidiary and retro-spective.” Austen writes: “I am reading a Society octavo, an Essay on the Military Police andInstitutions of the British Empire by Capt Pasley of the Engineers, a book which I protestedagainst at first, but which upon trial I find delightfully written and highly entertaining. Iam as much in love with the author as ever I was with Clarkson or Buchanan, or even thetwo Mr Smiths of the city—the first soldier I ever sighed for—but he does write withextraordinary force and spirit.” Jane Austen’s Letters to Her Sister Cassandra and Others, ed.R.W. Chapman(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 292. The statement is not justsubsidiary and retrospective, it is flippantly, ironically ambiguous.

were even laws excluding coloured people from burial areasdesignated for whites.61 When compared to the remarkably highdegree of colour-consciousness and segregation in the British Carib-bean, life in Sanditon seems relatively free from such restrictions.Apparently, all that is required for social acceptance is a fortune largeenough to pay for one’s chronic medical condition. As I have noted,the members of the seaside community do not express any socialdiscomfort at the imminent arrival of a “half mulatto,” and theyanticipate the ways in which they might capitalize on her sicklinessand wealth. In contrast to sentimental representations of helplessmulattos, the Sanditonians’ reactions to Miss Lambe are resolutelyunsentimental, and they draw attention to her financial rather thanher racial status. None of Miss Lambe’s relationships is representedas having an affective component. Her bond with Mrs Griffiths ispurely transactional, and Diana Parker, Mr Parker, and Lady Denhamlook forward to exploiting her for their own purposes.

If we assume the Caribbean as a context for the novel, it is possibleto plot a trajectory from a racially stratified society to one that isdivided along different lines—namely, class, money, and illness. Readin this way, the novel’s subordination of race to English social andeconomic concerns provides a gauge of precisely where the Caribbeanfeatures in the Austenian imaginary. As a locale, it remains remote,vaguely alluded to and important as an economic entity rather thanas a social actuality. Austen’s deployment of the term “half mulatto”is idiosyncratic, and biographical evidence suggests that her engage-ment with contemporary debates over “race” and slavery was relativelyslight.62 At the same time, the fictional and socio-historical frameworksthat I have sketched undoubtedly impinge on the novel, and thesecontexts allow the reader to make informed guesses as to how Austen

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63 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols. (London, 1755), s.vv. “chill”and “tender.”

64 Edwards, 2:12, 27.

might have completed Miss Lambe. Miss Lambe may not be a “hero-ine,” as Jordan complains, but her generic “West Indian-ness” emergesquite clearly if Sanditon is placed in the context of contemporarynovels, which in turn reflect widespread cultural assumptions andanxieties about brown women. Like the Carletons in Constantia Neville,Miss Lambe is wealthy enough to cause social unease among the whitecharacters; again, like the Carletons, she is first introduced as a “WestIndian,” and only later is she more precisely identified in racializedbut non-physical terms (apart from “sickly”—and perhaps “chilly andtender”—we know nothing about Miss Lambe’s physique). The un-usual identifier “half mulatto” might indicate Austen’s ignorance ofthe racial nomenclature of her time; or perhaps its excessive bio-logical precision is another sign of the novel’s lack of sentimentalityas regards the “West Injine” newcomer whose value to the communityis assessed in resolutely economic terms. Either way, the word “half”draws attention to Miss Lambe’s perceived instability and incomple-tion, and it is likely that, as in Wells’s, Helme’s, and Opie’s novels, theterm would have been reintroduced at frequent intervals to remindthe reader of the character’s place in the racial order of things.

As for “chilly and tender,” Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary lists “todepress, deject, discourage” as the second meaning for the verb “chill,”while “tender” may mean “soft” or “sensible, easily pained,” effeminate,delicate, amorous, young, and weak.63 It will never be possible toascertain whether Miss Lambe is cold or depressed, feeble or soft-hearted, but these qualities may have been regarded as characteristic ofwhite and brown Creoles. In his History, Edwards claims that whiteCreoles have colder skin than Europeans in order to protect them fromthe heat, perhaps explaining “chilly,” while he identifies “tenderness ofheart” as one of the most striking qualities displayed by women ofcolour.64 If Sanditon is drawing from descriptions such as Edwards’s,Miss Lambe would share the features of both white and brown “WestIndian” Creoles—a notion that is not altogether far-fetched, since sheis, after all, the child of a white person and a “mulatto.”

Whatever the reader’s interpretation of Sanditon’s scant but cultur-ally resonant details, a contextualized reading of the silent MissLambe suggests that her completed character may have ironized,confused, and challenged sentimental representations of the “contact


65 Tanner, 262.66 Williams, 115.67 Williams, 115.68 For the Creole/mulatto as an agent that disrupts comfortable binaries, see Wilson, 17.

zone” in which brown women are the willing subordinates of whites.Like the mulattos in Wanderings, Constantia Neville, and Farmer, MissLambe remains silent, but if she had spoken, it seems unlikely thatAusten would have deployed the “negro dialect” that instantly andinsistently marks Julia and Savanna as sentimental “others.” Senti-mental rhetoric, as is clear from Sir Edward Denham’s ludicrous quo-tations and effusions in conversation with Charlotte Heywood, ismercilessly satirized in this text, and the presence of the sickly butfinancially powerful Miss Lambe might have undercut the racializedsentimentality deployed in novels such as Farmer, Adeline, and Wander-ings. Rather than providing an affective resource then, Miss Lambemight have accentuated the novel’s concern with the intrusion of newwealth and its effect on old morals—the “supersession, supplantingand substitution” that Tanner claims defines this “little parable.”65

“Into the long and complicated interaction of landed and tradingcapital … the arrival of ‘the nabobs, negro-drivers, admirals, generals’and so on—is directly inserted,” observes Williams of Austen’s fictionand the fiction of her time.66 Miss Lambe is neither negro-driver nornabob, but her West Indian provenance and her “capital” mark heras an agent of the “confusion and change” that characterized Englishsociety at the turn of the century.67 Whether she “scatters her moneyso freely” as Lady Denham fears, or helps to “diffuse” wealth as MrParker hopes, Miss Lambe will certainly alter the society—and per-haps even the social structures—within which she is located. As adisruptive force then, Miss Lambe forms a part of Sanditon’s represen-tation of the shifts taking place in English moral and financial econo-mies at the turn of the nineteenth century.68 Austen’s incompleterendering of the “half mulatto” invites the reader to consider thetext’s relation to its fictional contemporaries, along with its possiblerevision of broader cultural constructions of brown women as bothdangerous “others” and reassuringly sentimental confirmations of abenign imperialism.

University of Toronto

Sanditon and Fictions of fiRacefl in the Abolition Era

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