Vulgar History Podcast
Regency Era Heiresses and the History of Enslavement
November 19, 2025
Hello and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster, and we are in our Regency Era. This season, we’re talking about the Regency era, which is a time period centred around the early 1800s in England and the UK, but it also has wider repercussions to other parts of the world, which we’ll also be talking about today.
Our guest today is Dr. Miranda Kaufmann, author of Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance and Slavery in the Caribbean, and her book is talking all about the connection between people in England, and people in the Caribbean, and the slave trade, and how we don’t often think or talk about that when you’re picturing the Regency era and you’re thinking about Jane Austen or Bridgerton. But the wealth that a lot of these people had was acquired through the slave trade, through the exploitation of enslaved African people. And Miranda’s book really gets at this topic… It’s one of those books where the more specific you are, kind of the broader your information can become.
Her book profiles nine heiresses, women who wound up in England, and their ties to the slave trade in the Caribbean, and in so doing, she’s able to really open up a broader conversation about this whole topic, which I’m going to get into in my conversation with Miranda Kaufmann. You may be familiar with her name from her previous book, The Black Tudors. I read that when that came out several years ago, and it was such a huge shift for me personally to read about all of her excellent research that she did, just reinserting people of colour into the Tudor era of England, which is often thought about as just white people were there. But in fact, she did so much research there, and then she’s doing a similar amount of research here, to really just open up our understanding of a time period that maybe you think you know, in this case, the Regency era.
Anyway, I was so pleased that Miranda agreed to speak with me on the podcast. So please enjoy this conversation with Dr. Miranda Kaufmann.
—————
Ann: So, we are joined today by Miranda Kaufmann, author of Heiresses, a new book which profiles nine women who married into the British aristocracy, bringing huge wealth generated from Caribbean slavery into the country. Miranda, my first question is: What made you write a book on this topic? How did you get interested in this idea?
Miranda: It goes back to quite a long way to 2006, when I was hired by English Heritage to do a survey of the houses they look after with their links to enslavement and abolition, because it was in the run up to 2007, which was the bicentenary of the abolition of British trafficking of enslaved Africans that crossed the Atlantic, and there was quite a lot of commemoration of that at the time. I was still doing my PhD on Black Tudors, but I took this on as a side project. They gave me a list of 33 houses to review and a list of ways in which a house might be connected, and beyond the obvious ones of that it was built or owned by an enslaver, plantation owner, or trafficker, or merchant selling goods produced by enslaved people, one of the things on the list was heiresses. So, if the man of the house had married a woman who had lots of money from those sources, then that was another way in.
So, that’s when I first encountered the phenomenon and one of the most colourful characters in my book, Elizabeth Vassall, because she married Sir Godfrey Webster of Battle Abbey, which was built on the site of the Battle of Hastings, so it was quite an old house. So, it was my first sort of heiress, and it was on the back burner for a while, while I wrote my book Black Tudors, but then I came back to it seven years ago.
Ann: I will ask you some questions about the individual women you profile, but could you give us just a sense of how common it was for women to inherit plantations in the Caribbean?
Miranda: Well, if you think about it, I think men would rather have passed their property on to other men, but that’s not how human reproduction works. So, there are several instances, you know, they’ll leave it to a son or a grandson or a nephew or a distant cousin or anyone male, but if all of that runs out, or if they’re particularly fond of their daughter or their niece or whatever, you do get wives as widows inheriting, or daughters, or nieces, granddaughters. So, it was not a hundred percent common, but it definitely happened.
When I started out the book research, I did a sort of wider survey and found about 150 women that sort of fit the bill. But that’s specifically women who then moved to Britain, married in Britain; there would have been a larger number of women who inherited in the Caribbean. And actually, in the 1830s, when enslavement itself came to an end in the British Empire, forty percent of the people who claimed compensation were women. But I wouldn’t classify all of those as “heiresses” as such, because for me, I had a kind of higher bar of how wealthy they had to be. Whereas several of those women would have owned a relatively small number of enslaved people, sometimes only two or three.
Ann: In the stories of the women that you profile, you mentioned several different islands. Could you just give sort of an overview of where most of the heiresses inherited the property from? Like, which islands, specifically?
Miranda: Right. So, the Caribbean was sort of split up amongst different European powers. There were British islands, French islands, Spanish islands, and even other European nations that you don’t immediately associate with the Caribbean had small numbers of islands that they controlled at various points, such as the Danish people had some of what’s now the U.S. Virgin Islands, for example. But the main British island was Jamaica. So, a significant number of the women I looked at were Jamaican. And then Barbados was sort of the first major British colony in the Caribbean. You know, and also some of these islands changed hands several times between the European powers during the period of enslavement. So, Jamaica, Barbados, I’ve also got women in the book from Saint Kitts with links to Saint Vincent, Grenada, Antigua. So, there are several different islands across the Caribbean that were colonized by the British at different points.
Ann: So many places are mentioned in the book, I found that… This is all new to me. I’ve come across, you know, just references to people having wealth from the Caribbean, but I’ve never read a book that really delved into what did that mean before. And I found it really interesting too, how these women, when they returned to England (or some of them were born there), how were they viewed by British aristocratic society at the time?
Miranda: Well, they were viewed as an opportunity to get rich quick. You know, because the sort of British class system very much had the eldest son inheriting all the family wealth, partly to keep these estates in one hand so that they didn’t get split up and parcelled up over a few generations. Younger sons, you know, had a choice of the army or the church or marrying well. So, they were definitely an attractive marriage option, but there were downsides.
People were looked down on as being nouveau-riche, so new money, or, you know, being in trade, as you’ll sort of see in the novels of Jane Austen, for example. These people definitely were in trade, although plantation owning could then potentially be partially come off as land owning. But it’s not quite the same as owning land in Britain, although some of these families then go in for buying land in Britain. And then, there’s also this fear of potentially criminal ancestry because of the earlier history of, you know, before the British started transporting convicts to Australia, they would actually send them to Virginia or Barbados. So, there’s a bit of that in some of the, kind of, stereotyping. Also, there’s this fear of women having some African ancestry somewhere in the family tree and these concerns sort of come through in the literature of the time as well.
Ann: Well, your book opens with the story of a young heiress being kidnapped, basically. These women were just seen by some people, as you said, just sort of a way to get rich quick, which puts them at some risk, I guess, of marrying some sort of cad, being taken away.
Miranda: Well, I mean, that was, again, a broader issue as well with any heiress. In the first half of the… Up until 1754, it was easy to get a quick marriage in England as well, sort of on Fleet Street, and that’s when Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act came in in 1754 to make it much harder to get married. So, you had to read the banns three times and have witnesses. This was partly to avoid sort of heiresses being abducted and the family fortune with it.
That’s where Gretna Green then comes into play as being the first town you get to when you cross the Scottish border, and Scottish law was different. So then, the second half of the 18th century onwards, if you want to steal an heiress, you have to get as far as Scotland with them before you can marry them.
Ann: You mentioned a minute ago, Jane Austen, about the heiress. Can you speak about the character in Sanditon, whose story is similar to some of the people you profile?
Miranda: Yeah, so Sanditon was Jane Austen’s last novel that she never finished. I wish she had because it’d be so interesting to know what happened to Miss Lambe, who is the only, well, the only Caribbean heiress in Austen’s work. Also, I think, probably the only person of colour in Austen’s work. So, she’s described as being “half-mulatto,” which is a pejorative term now, and I mean, quite a horrible word, really, because it comes from Spanish for mule, essentially, a mule being a cross between a horse and a donkey. But that’s how Austen describes her.
So, she is very wealthy in the story. And again, you know, as I found with real women in my book, even the hint of some African ancestry was not enough to put off the fortune hunters. So, Lady Denham in Sanditon is very keen for Miss Lambe to marry, I think, her nephew. She’s seen as a prize to be married off, but she’s also not very well. You know, she’s described as chilly, so she’s sort of got a bit of a weak constitution, which is partly why she is at this seaside resort of Sanditon, because the sea air was considered, sort of, good for your health.
Ann: I did also want to ask you about, and you mentioned this in the book, how much interaction… Like, we’re talking about the heiress who came to England or lived in England, how much did they even know or understand about what the plantations were like that they would inherit? Did they have any interaction with those people?
Miranda: Yeah, so I think some people have tried to characterize these absentee enslavers as not really knowing what was going on, especially women, because they sort of assumed that they weren’t involved in the sort of day-to-day business. But that’s not what I found. Several of these women were born in the Caribbean and spent their early years in the Caribbean. I just saw a reference yesterday that, you know, children in the Caribbean were sort of taught to chastise enslaved people from birth. Sometimes they were given an enslaved person as a christening present, or they would be taught to whip them if they didn’t behave, like, domestics in the house, from a really, really early age.
So, I think especially some of those who don’t move to Britain until they’re teens, or you know, one of the women in the book, she’s 20 when she leaves Jamaica, they really have a pretty clear idea of what they sort of grew up around there. And then we have examples… So, when they’re in Britain, the estates tend to be managed by an attorney on their behalf, and you have this correspondence. So, you know, I found letters written by the women themselves with very clear instructions on what should be done on the plantation, what should be planted. In one case, Frances Dalzell, in chapter two, is sending instructions for more enslaved Africans to be purchased and even talking about what brand should be burned onto their skin.
Ann: So, I think that’s an important thing to point out, too, that it’s… It’s tempting, I think, or it has been tempting for people to think, “Oh, they didn’t really understand what was going on there.” But clearly, a lot of these women, they wind up managing these plantations, they were quite involved, and they knew what was happening.
But I do want to also talk to you about another aspect of your book, which is, as much as possible, you give voice to the enslaved people themselves. What was it like piecing together those historical records? I assume it’s so challenging.
Miranda: Well, I’ve always been committed to telling stories of people of African descent. My earlier work, Black Tudors, pulled together very fragmentary evidence of the lives of African people living in Britain in the early modern period, and I suppose I took the same approach with this book in that, you know, I think if you ask the right questions and look in the right places, you’re always going to find more information about these lives than you might immediately think possible. So, I tried to do that here.
You know, a lot of these family papers, the plantation management papers, have lists of the names, ages of birth of enslaved people, which doesn’t give you a lot of meat on the bones, but you can begin to sort of discern family relationships and things like that. And then, you know, wills can be revealing. There’s one woman in the book who sort of frees an enslaved man called Gusman in her will and gives him some land as well. So, you get some sense of relationships there. And then, in the 19th century, you get these registers of enslaved people. The British government dictated that you had to then write a list of everyone on the plantation every three years. And that was quite helpful as well. It has a column about— They quite often record who the mother of a person is, especially if they’re a child, so that’s quite handy.
But the most sort of satisfying approach sometimes was actually using the enslavers’ words against them. There are some interesting cases where they’re actually writing pro-slavery pamphlets, but they use real-life examples from people’s lives. So then you get these sort of snapshots of real people’s lives on the plantations. I mean, I think one of the most fascinating stories is that of Betsy Newton. We know about her because she managed to escape enslavement in Barbados and travel to London to confront her enslaver, and we have the notes that he took on their interview.
Ann: Everything about it, the fact that she managed to escape, the fact that she got to England. And what was the… It’s all very complicated, the status of enslavement in England, but there’s something about once she showed up there, she was able to be free because she was there. Could you explain how that worked?
Miranda: There’s a sort of free soil principle in England that goes back to at least the Tudor period, where, whether you were enslaved elsewhere in the world, if you set foot on English soil, you became free. And then that gets corrupted in the 18th century because you find enslavers bringing people they’ve enslaved in the colonies back to England and trying to continue to claim them as property, and certainly kind of treating them as property and trying to get legal rulings. But there’s never any kind of explicit statute law outlining how slavery is meant to work within the British Isles.
But then in 1772, there was a court case, the Somerset case, in which Lord Mansfield ruled that it was illegal to forcibly transport Africans back to the Caribbean once they had got to England, and that was sort of more widely interpreted as setting Africans free in England, although that isn’t what Lord Mansfield actually said. But it meant that, yeah, having arrived in England, Betsy’s enslavers could not force her to return to Barbados. After Betsy comes to see her enslaver, he says, “She is free by virtue of arriving in England.” But there’s no way he’s going to free her four children, who are back in Barbados, that she also wants freed.
Ann: And that was part of the reason why she went there, was she wanted freedom for herself as well as for her family, so it’s sort of heartbreaking. But she stayed in England as a free person, I think. Did you say in your book she married twice, which you can just tell by her change of surnames? Was that her?
Miranda: That’s right. And she keeps on petitioning for her children, but he’s not going to budge. She knows how they’re doing because she’s getting letters from relatives in Barbados, which, again, is interesting because people assume most enslaved people couldn’t read and write. But this family, the Hylas family, or the Newton family, Hylas-Newton, this family is able to correspond across the Atlantic.
Ann: And so, another story… There are so many interesting asides and stories within stories in your book, but I was wondering if you could share the story of one of the heiresses who fakes her own daughter’s death.
Miranda: So, yeah, this was an eye-catching one. This is Elizabeth Vassall, who was actually that first heiress that I encountered when I was researching Battle Abbey, oooh… almost 20 years ago. Isn’t that crazy? And so, she is very unhappily married as a teenager to the much older Sir Godfrey Webster and feels pretty much imprisoned in Sussex. And then, she finally persuades him to take her on a kind of extended grand tour, travels around the continent, and then she begins to have fun and has at least one, well, several romances, let’s say. But she falls wildly in love in Italy with Lord Holland. Sir Godfrey has given up and gone home, but she stays out there, and she gets pregnant, and she already has three children, two sons and a daughter with Sir Godfrey. But she gets pregnant by Lord Holland, and Sir Godfrey has already been back home for at least a year, so it’s definitely not his. This means that divorce is inevitable, and at the time, if you got divorced, the father automatically got custody of the children.
She was fond of her daughter, Harriet, who, actually, some people say was not fathered by Sir Godfrey, but by Lord Pelham, but that’s another story. I think he’s actually Sir Thomas Pelham. Anyway, some people say Harriet was fathered actually by Sir Thomas Pelham, but it’s hard to prove these things. Anyway, so she loves Harriet, and she can’t bear to be parted with her, so she comes up with this “visionary scheme,” she calls it. She gets her watercolour paints and paints red spots all over Harriet’s arms and legs, and tells everyone she’s got an infectious disease, and sends the servants away, and then dresses her up as a boy and sends her back to England via Hamburg. Meanwhile, she tells everyone Harriet’s dead and gets her oblong guitar case and fills it with stones and clothing and a wax mask and sends it to the British consulate in Livorno to be buried and tells everyone that that’s Harriet. Later gossip said she also put a dead goat in there for good measure, to get the correct smell.
But yeah, so she sort of successfully gets away with this for several years and later on has to reveal it so as not to prejudice her second husband, Lord Holland’s political career. But it’s quite a visionary scheme, isn’t it?
Ann: It’s… The fact that it worked, I think, is one of the most stunning things about it. That no one figured it out until she had to reveal it herself. A good scheme. [laughs]
Miranda: Well, I suppose child mortality was quite common at the time. You know, lots of children died all the time, so it perhaps wasn’t quite as surprising. And then, you’re away from home, you’re travelling, there’s fewer people to kind of keep an eye on you. It might have been harder at home with a full staff of household servants.
Ann: And the chance that her husband might run into Harriet on the street or something.
So, another extraordinary story. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about Frances Dalzell, who is a mixed-heritage heiress, who was legally declared white, which is another stunning story.
Miranda: Yeah. So, she was born in Jamaica. Her father is a South Sea Company merchant of Scottish descent, and her mother, Susanna Augier, who’s also an amazing character, her mother was born enslaved, probably with an African mother, and she’s freed as a teenager, partly probably because of the influence of her father’s business partner, Peter Caillard, who was sort of sexually abusing her from an early age, I think.
Anyway. Frances was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1729, and when she was about nine years old, her mother petitions for her and her half sister to have the rights of whites. And this is this crazy piece of legislation that was passed in Jamaica, actually, to try and exclude people of mixed heritage from the political and civic rights. So, they got to a point in 1733 where they were worried that people of mixed heritage were able to vote and hold property, and they didn’t like that. So, they had to draw a line in their legislation as to who was who counted as what they called a mulatto and who didn’t. They came up with this formula, where I think you had to be four generations removed from an African ancestor.
And then what happened was that there were all these relatively privileged people who didn’t fit that description, and they start petitioning to be exempt from the new ruling, and that’s what Susanna Augier was doing. She wanted those civic rights of being able to testify in court and to hold property, and she successfully petitioned for that. And then shortly afterwards, Frances leaves for London. But it’s quite mad. Well, most racial divisions, legally, are mad, but this is one that people find quite surprising.
Ann: Well, and then the fact that Frances herself came to the UK, she got married. I think this is probably the most similar story to the heiress in Sanditon, perhaps, just in terms of being mixed heritage, although there’s a portrait, you have portraits in your book of all of these women, and Frances, quite light-skinned. So, anything that people… Her mixed heritage, I think people would know about it if they knew her family history, but it’s not visually apparent, I wouldn’t think.
Miranda: Although I was giving a talk, I did show her portrait in a talk in Scotland recently, and somebody of mixed heritage in the room said, “Ohhh, I can tell.” But no, she said she thought she could tell, and looking at it more closely, I did think that potentially there was some texture to her hair as well that was quite interesting. But, yeah, as far as we know, she had potentially an African grandmother, but even potentially her grandmother was mixed because we don’t know the identity of her grandmother. But yes, it’s fascinating.
Ann: I wanted to ask you about one more woman in your book, if I may, which is the aunt of Jane Austen.
Miranda: That’s a good story, isn’t it? And again, I think, although people have been investigating Jane Austen’s links to enslavement and, you know, have gone so far as to say that, “Oh, well, she drank tea with Caribbean sugar in it. So, that’s a link.” But I think this is a much stronger one that most people don’t seem to have heard of.
So, Jane Austen’s mother’s maiden name was Leigh; her name was Cassandra Leigh. She had a brother called James Leigh, who then took on the name Perrot to inherit an estate from the Perrot family. And this James Leigh-Perrot married Jane Cholmeley, who was a woman from Barbados, who is the subject of chapter four of my book. So, she was born in Barbados and then moved to England, again, at quite a young age, about six or seven, and went to boarding school and stayed with her cousins in Lincolnshire in the school holidays. She’s quite a character, and she lives into her nineties. So, from Jane Austen’s perspective, she’s this sort of stingy, elderly aunt who’s constantly complaining, not happy with her lot, despite being sort of fabulously wealthy with a nice country house in Berkshire and a nice townhouse in Bath. She won’t lend any money, she won’t give any money to the Austen’s who are, sort of, rather more in need of it. You know, and if only she had sponsored Jane Austen, then maybe we’d have more Jane Austen novels.
So, Austen scholars know about this kind of colourful episode where she actually gets arrested for shoplifting lace in Bath in 1799, and it’s mad. She ends up in prison in Ilchester jail for six, probably about six months, when she’s awaiting trial. But I think it’s actually been… It’s a blackmail plot. But I mean, that’s quite a kind of colourful story. But actually, her Barbados backstory is even more colourful, and people don’t seem to know about that. I found this sort of fascinating story where her mother remarries this really unscrupulous, dastardly character called Thomas Workman, who is a piece of work and is sort of trying to steal the Cholmeley fortune for his own purposes, for his sons from a former marriage. And if it wasn’t for the big hurricane that hits Barbados in 1784, he might well have managed it. But Jane Leigh-Perrot and her sister Catherine are both really angry that they haven’t inherited more wealth from their mother when she dies. Yeah, they don’t come across in a great light in that correspondence either.
Ann: And can you just, for Jane Austen fans, which are the characters who you feel are probably inspired by this aunt?
Miranda: Well, so there’s always a sort of controversy between whether Austen’s characters are all from her imagination, and we should do credit to her just imagining people. But then there’s always the temptation to draw parallels with people that she would have known. So, there are three characters that scholars have linked to Jane Leigh-Perrot.
One is Mrs. Allen in Northanger Abbey. Interestingly, Jane Austen started writing Northanger Abbey on a visit to stay with her aunt and uncle in Bath. In the same way, Catherine Morland, the heroine of Northanger Abbey, goes to Bath with this childless couple, Mr. and Mrs. Allen, so there’s a parallel there. Mrs. Allen is also a kind of rather vain and irritating character. [laughs]
Again, in Mansfield Park, Aunt Norris is another kind of unattractive character. Some people say the name Norris might have come from Robert Norris, who was a horrible Liverpool trafficker for enslaved Africans who upset Thomas Clarkson, who Jane Austen was in love with as an author, Thomas Clarkson being a leading British abolitionist. Anyway, Aunt Norris, yeah, potentially that link to enslavement as well. But also, she likes a bit of petty theft herself; she’s always sponging things and putting little things in her pockets. So, people have seen that as a reference to the theft of the lace in Bath.
And then, thirdly, interestingly, Lady Denham in Sanditon, again, who’s the sort of lady of the manor who sees Miss Lambe, the heiress, as an attractive prospect for her nephew. She, again, is this sort of elderly, very wealthy, very stingy, unappealing character who has a lot of younger relations sort of fighting over who’s going to inherit. Again, by her old age, the Austens and their cousins were all very keen to get a slice of the pie from her. I also found these links that those scholars hadn’t mentioned because they haven’t read all her letters. Both Jane Leigh-Perrot and Lady Denham keep cows as pets for their milk, and they also quite like they both give a relation a gold watch as a sign of favour.
So, who knows? We’ll see. We’ll see. Yeah, I don’t want to I don’t want to emphasize it too strongly, but there do seem to be these parallels with Austen’s characters.
Ann: To mirror what you do towards the end of your book and your conclusion, where do we see the legacy of all of this today?
Miranda: Well, I think that it’s writ large. I think that, you know, the racism and racial inequality that blight our world today can be clearly linked back to the history of enslavement, you know, more broadly, obviously in the United States as well as in the Caribbean. But obviously, it was the English who started enslavement in the United States. So, that’s our fault too.
And actually, I was listening to something yesterday, I was quite interested in, actually, the legacy of fear. In the British Caribbean at least, the white people were significantly outnumbered by the Black people, and there was this constant fear of uprisings and violence. And I think you can potentially draw a thread there to the sort of racial stereotyping of Black people as violent or dangerous. I mean, we had a… There was a horrible stabbing on a train here last week, and some people immediately jumped to the conclusion that the man wielding the knife must have been an illegal immigrant. So, I think there is still this fear that could potentially be a legacy of that.
But, you know, the financial inequality is clear as well, and all sorts of other ways of measuring kind of unequal outcomes. In the Caribbean itself, you know, once they couldn’t make money out of sugar plantations anymore, once the enslavement was ended, there was a lack of investment in those colonies. You know, the CARICOM itself, the leaders of the Caribbean heads of government, have come up with a list of ten ways to repair the damage done, and they’ve sort of identified damage, you know, psychologically. So, you know, the need for an apology and acknowledgement, but also areas of education, health, mental health, physical health. For example, the Caribbean has got the highest rates of type 2 diabetes and hypertension, which is a direct link to, sort of, the sugar-heavy diet. But also, there are technological downsides and infrastructure— I mean, there are just so many myriad legacies, negative legacies of this part of our history.
Ann: Well, and you look at… In your book, you mention your research you did into your own family’s connections to all of this. What did you find about your family, and how did it connect to the stories you tell in your book?
Miranda: So, I suppose one of the main arguments of the book is that these connections to enslavement are just sort of everywhere in British society, you know, in the period of enslavement. You’re only ever sort of two or three steps away from someone who’s profiting from this.
So inevitably, my family, when I looked at my family tree, some members of my family also profited from enslavement. You know, Kaufmann is a Jewish name, and my dad’s other family only moved to the UK in the 20th century. But on my mum’s side, I come from a Welsh landed gentry family, which can trace the family tree back pretty far, and it was on that side of the family that I found a couple of Liverpool merchants who owned slaving ships, and also a solicitor who was out in Kingston, Jamaica in the middle of the 18th century, who also ended up owning part of a plantation and enslaved people, and interestingly married a woman… He was one of the people who petitioned for these rights of whites for his children because he’d married a woman… He’d actually had several children with this woman of mixed descent in Jamaica, and then actually, unusually, brought her back to London and married her in London and had sort of other children and descended from one of his daughters.
And then, really weirdly, there were sort of distant links to actually some of the families in the book that I wasn’t aware of at all when I started the research, but then became apparent. So, sort of through the Liverpool connection, some of the two of the daughters of the heiress in chapter five married into a Liverpool slaving family that were then related to our part, our Liverpool branch. So, that was a weird one. And then, you know, I found… We have some portraits on the wall here of a man who actually inherited Newton Plantation and Barbados, the one that Betsy Newton ran away from, in 1870. I’m not related to him, but his wife was my great-grandmother’s godmother, so the paintings ended up here. So, it’s all interconnected, and, you know, my family is British history in microcosm.
Ann: That’s so fascinating that you described you started researching this for all those reasons, you talked about the beginning, and then for it to wind up that it connects back to this portrait in your own home, it’s just sort of… [laughs]
Miranda: Wild.
Ann: Yeah, yeah. All the connections. So, can you let people know if they want to… I know you’re doing lots of events and talks, and things. How can people keep up with what you’re doing if they want to come and see you in person?
Miranda: If you want to find out all about my work and latest events coming up, go to www.MirandaKaufmann.com. I’m also on several social media sites as @DrMirandaKaufmann, specifically Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky and LinkedIn. I also have a new website in its infancy, www.Heiresses.co.uk, where I’m hoping to put up some of the research that didn’t make it into the book onto that broader swathe of 150 heiresses.
Ann: That’s wonderful. And that’s great to have that resource as well for people who want to find their own family connections, potentially, to this whole topic.
Miranda: Yeah. And if people are looking for their own family connections, I’d recommend the UCL, the University College London Legacies of British Slavery Database, which was a really good source for me. You can put any family surname in there, and it will come up with whether they got compensation for enslaved people at the end of slavery.
Ann: Oh, fascinating. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today.
Miranda: You’re welcome. Thanks, Ann. It was great.
—————
So, Miranda’s book, Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance, and Slavery in the Caribbean, is available wherever you get your books. There’s a little link to it in the show notes here. If you want to use my Bookshop account to buy that, then I get a little commission, and that is something you may want to consider, or not. Borrow it from the library. Just read this book. It’s such a good book. It’s fantastic.
We’re continuing on with our Regency Era series in honour of my book that I have coming out in February, Rebel of the Regency: The Scandalous Saga of Caroline of Brunswick, Britain’s Uncrowned Queen. You can learn more about my book, which does not involve the Caribbean, although there’s lots of crossover. In Miranda’s book, she talks about, at one point, there’s an author called Monk Lewis who inherits some property in the Caribbean, and he goes there to see what it’s like. And he’s kind of horrified by what he sees, which… understandable. Anyway, Monk Lewis was a friend of Caroline of Brunswick, who is the main character of the book that I wrote at RebelOfTheRegency.com. There’s also links there that you can pre-order it as a book, as an e-book, as an audiobook, part of which I will be reading. It’s going to be available in North America, and it will also be available in the UK and other places. I don’t have specific details about that yet, but those details should be coming soon.
And yeah, next week we’re going to be… Like, we’re in a Regency Era. This is the new series of the show, and I think, as I hope I’ve demonstrated so far with the episodes we’ve done, you know, we’re looking at this era that you might think you know, and kind of digging into some of the more interesting, lesser-known corners of it to see what was it really like. There’s a lot to dive into, and next week’s episode, I think you’re going to really enjoy. I’ve got a very special guest, a return guest to this podcast, who I know you’re all going to be happy to hear from again.
Anyway, thank you so much for listening to Vulgar History, and until next time, keep your pants on and your tits out.
Vulgar History is researched, scripted, and hosted by Ann Foster, that’s me! Editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. Transcripts of this podcast are available at VulgarHistory.com by Aveline Malek. You can get early, ad-free episodes of Vulgar History by becoming a paid member of our Patreon for as low as one dollar a month at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. Vulgar History merchandise is available at VulgarHistory.com/Store for Americans and for everyone else at VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com. Follow us on social media @VulgarHistoryPod and get in touch with me via email at VulgarHistoryPod@gmail.com.
References:
Learn more in Miranda’s book Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance, and Slavery in the Caribbean (affiliate link)
—
Preorder info for Ann’s upcoming book, Rebel of the Regency!
—
Get 15% off all the gorgeous jewellery and accessories at common.era.com/vulgar or go to commonera.com and use code VULGAR at checkout
—
Get Vulgar History merch at vulgarhistory.com/store (best for US shipping) and vulgarhistory.redbubble.com (better for international shipping)
—
Support Vulgar History on Patreon
—
Vulgar History is an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which means that a small percentage of any books you click through and purchase will come back to Vulgar History as a commission. Use this link to shop there and support Vulgar History.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
