Maria Edgeworth and "the iniquities in Jamaica"

Maria Edgeworth’s fictional responses to slavery and abolition have been extensively discussed since the publication of Susan C. Greenfield’s 1997 essay, “‘Abroad and at Home.’” A hitherto unexamined and geographically scattered body of correspondence now reveals Edgeworth’s links to the owners of four Jamaican sugar plantations. I establish the familial ties that connected Edgeworth to plantations in America as well as Jamaica, and identify the social contacts that she exploited to advance the case of a family of tenants from her Irish estate who had gone to Jamaica to make their fortunes. The uncovering of the interventions that Edgeworth made on their behalf, at odds with the more critical tendency of her published work on Caribbean slavery and the plantocracy and of other unpublished writing by her on waged and forced labor, throws new light on the relationship between “home” and “abroad” in Edgeworth’s thought, and on the power relations and injustices with which she engaged. The article thus illuminates Edgeworth’s incompatible stances on the debates surrounding the emancipation of enslaved people and the abolition of slavery.