A New Novel Gives Wings — and a Megaphone — to a Complex Woman

Posted in Articles, Biography, Book/Video Reviews, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive, Slavery, Women on 2021-10-27 19:26Z by Steven

A New Novel Gives Wings — and a Megaphone — to a Complex Woman

The New York Times
2021-07-08

Carole V. Bell


Steffi Walthall

ISLAND QUEEN
By Vanessa Riley

Vanessa Riley was intrigued when she encountered the figure of Miss Lambe in Jane Austen’s unfinished final novel, “Sanditon.” Given the dearth of people of color in 18th- and 19th-century British literature, she wanted to know where the wealthy colored debutante had come from. Was she a product of a progressive authorial imagination? Or had real-life Miss Lambes merely been excised from popular culture and public memory?

The quest to “find Miss Lambe” turned into a long and meaningful one for the author — a 10-year journey, which revealed that Austen’s aims may have been progressive but they weren’t born of fantasy. As Riley wrote, “Finding Dorothy Kirwan Thomas, the women of the Entertainment Society, and so many other Black women who had agency and access to all levels of power has restored my soul.”

Riley’s commitment to restoring these unsung women to their rightful place in the popular imagination was a driving force behind her riveting and transformative new novel. Yet her chosen subject bears little resemblance to a pampered heiress like Miss Lambe; the contours of Dorothy Kirwan Thomas’s life have a much harsher bent. Called “Doll” or “Dolly” when she was young, Dorothy was born to an Irish planter and an enslaved woman in 1756 on the island of Montserrat. In her 90 years, she endured bondage, assault and abuse, secured her own freedom against incredible odds, accumulated great wealth and considerable influence, and became the founding matriarch of a prosperous Caribbean clan…

Read the entire book review here.

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Island Queen, A Novel

Posted in Biography, Books, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive, Novels, Slavery on 2021-10-25 14:16Z by Steven

Island Queen, A Novel

William Morrow (an imprint of HarperCollins)
2021-07-06
592 pages
6x9in
Hardcover ISBN: 9780063002845
Paperback ISBN: 9780063002852
E-book ISBN: 9780063002869
Digital Audio, MP3 ISBN: 9780063002876

Vanessa Riley

A remarkable, sweeping historical novel based on the incredible true life story of Dorothy Kirwan Thomas, a free woman of color who rose from slavery to become one of the wealthiest and most powerful landowners in the colonial West Indies.

Born into slavery on the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat, Doll bought her freedom—and that of her sister and her mother—from her Irish planter father and built a legacy of wealth and power as an entrepreneur, merchant, hotelier, and planter that extended from the marketplaces and sugar plantations of Dominica and Barbados to a glittering luxury hotel in Demerara on the South American continent.

Vanessa Riley’s novel brings Doll to vivid life as she rises above the harsh realities of slavery and colonialism by working the system and leveraging the competing attentions of the men in her life: a restless shipping merchant, Joseph Thomas; a wealthy planter hiding a secret, John Coseveldt Cells; and a roguish naval captain who will later become King William IV of England.

From the bustling port cities of the West Indies to the forbidding drawing rooms of London’s elite, Island Queen is a sweeping epic of an adventurer and a survivor who answered to no one but herself as she rose to power and autonomy against all odds, defying rigid eighteenth-century morality and the oppression of women as well as people of color. It is an unforgettable portrait of a true larger-than-life woman who made her mark on history.

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