05/02/2020
🚨Next Thursday!!!!!
Join the History Group at 6:00 PM on February 13, 2020, with Dr. Miranda Kaufmann for an interesting lecture on the topic: "Jane Austen's Aunt: Barbadian Heiress."
About the talk:
Of the millions of words written about the famous novelist Jane Austen, very few are devoted to her ‘Aunt Perrot’, who is usually characterized as a wealthy yet stingy old woman, reluctant to share her money with her poorer nieces and nephews.
More time has been devoted to telling the strange story of her trial for shoplifting than to investigating the source of her wealth. But, in the course of her current research into over 150 Caribbean heiresses whose vast inherited fortunes generated by the exploitation and abuse of enslaved men, women and children were imported by marriage into British society, Dr. Miranda Kaufmann realized that this ‘Aunt Perrot’, more properly Mrs. Jane Leigh-Perrot, had been born Jane Cholmeley in Barbados in 1744.
In this talk, Dr. Kaufmann will outline what she has discovered so far about Jane, her family in Barbados, and the life she enjoyed in Britain, funded in part by the profits of enslavement.
About the presenter:
Dr. Miranda Kaufmann is the author of the critically acclaimed, Wolfson History Prize and Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize shortlisted, book Black Tudors: The Untold Story, which has been optioned by Silverprint Pictures for a TV drama series.
An Oxford-educated historian, she is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Liverpool, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, the University of London, where she co-convenes the successful Black British History workshop series.
She is currently working on her second book, "Heiresses: Slavery & The Caribbean Marriage Trade" and as Lead Historian for the Colonial Countryside project; a collaboration between the National Trust (UK) and the University of Leicester.