cgrose.bsky.social

The Crown’s Silence by Brooke N. Newman gives a clear view into the British monarchy’s long entanglement with the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas. Frequently, omissions allowed scholars to avoid highlighting and analysing the British royal family’s role in encouraging and profiting from the slave trade and slavery. When Elizabeth I became queen, England’s finances were in a parlous state, and to rectify this she encouraged traders to follow the lead of Portugal and Spain and plunder west Africa. When she understood the profitability of the slave trade, she offered her political support, eventually investing herself and loaning navy warships as protection against the Spanish and Portuguese. The monarchs who followed Elizabeth used her strategy of investment and using military support to perpetuate the slave trade. Newman’s comprehensive and careful archival work demonstrates the significance of scrutinizing business transactions and policy to establish historical patterns. She shows the economic and political importance of slavery to the British monarchy and how, when abolishing the slave trade became a popular moral cause, the royal family became more oblique about how they benefitted. Throughout The Crown’s Silence, Newman builds the argument by using a variety of archives that show how the monarchy was tied to commercial interests within the city of London. Credit facilities developed to facilitate the slave trade and the slave dependent plantation economies in the Americas. The historical narrative is at its strongest when she describes how the legal framework around slaveholding became more complicated in the eighteenth century in part because the British wanted to create a distinction between themselves and the “venal slavers” in America, creating a tiered system where slaves of African descent in the British isles had the potential for liberty. Creating the distinction fueled the abolition movement which peaked around the time Queen Victoria came to the throne. After slavery was abolished in the Caribbean, because people of African descent were put into a harsh form of coerced apprenticeship. As Newman points out, there was colonial campaign to credit Queen Victoria with the end of slavery and apprenticeship, although, unlike the slaveholders, they received no compensation for their years of labor. Moreover, Newman concludes that Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, the standard for future royal “statements without teeth or legal implications; statements carefully crafted to highlight Britain’s abolition efforts and erase centuries of racial exploitation and violence by omission.” Whether your interest is historical fiction or history, you will find this book a pleasure to read.

I reread Possession recently in part to see how it held up to the test of time, but mostly in the hope that I could escape into something complex and romantic. Possession is about the growing romance between two literary scholars as they delve into the mysterious relationship between two Victorian poets. Roland is a literary scholar who has trapped himself in an unsatisfactory job and relationship. While doing research on behalf of Professor Blackadder, he happens upon what he is sure are never before seen letters from the famous Victorian poet RH Ash to an unknown woman. Ash is not only the subject of widespread academic interest, but a wealthy American collector has also determined to acquire all his letters and paraphernalia. Roland absconds with the letters from the London Library, keeping them secret even from Blackadder. The consequence of Roland’s desire to possess the letters and discover their meaning creates chaos in Roland’s professional and personal life. Byatt must have enjoyed skewering academics by giving tired tropes new life. The desire to possess the poets’ legacy drove the all the academics in the novel to extremes. Roland’s research takes him to the woman’s studies department of a northern university where he meets Maud, who is an expert on the Victorian poet Christabel LaMotte. Unlike Ash, La Motte is not a considered part of the literary canon. Byatt gives her a feminine poetic style, reminiscent of Emily Dickenson, but with references to the fairy stories and folktales of Brittany. LaMotte lived with her friend Blanche and these scholars speculate that they had an exclusive, lesbian relationship. When LaMotte disappears briefly, Blanche kills herself and LaMotte spends the rest of her life a spinster. The novel details the love story of LaMotte and Ash letters the letters recovered through Maud and Roland’ s investigation and reanalysis of their poetry using the new information. Academics, collectors, and past lovers chase Maud and Roland as they try to discover what happened to LaMotte and Ash. Still, the novel’s heart is the tragic love story between LaMotte and Ash, but their legacy is about daring to love.

How Yeva, Nastia, Solomiya, and the unloved men trapped in the back of a van try to hold onto what is precious changes the shape of their reality. In Endling a possibly last-of-its-kind snail named Lefty, a mother, a sister, love drives them to do the improbable during an invasion that no one believes is quite real. Love and heartache drive the narrative with its quirky narrators and structural interludes, but the novel is not maudlin or formulaic. The novel comments of the complexity of Ukraine’s culture and economy, “the West’s” misperception and generalizations about Ukrainian women, and the spectacle of the invasion. I read this novel a few months ago and it has stayed with me more than anything else I read in the past year.