Heiresses

Marriage, Inheritance and Caribbean Slavery

Exposing the hidden ways slave-produced wealth poured into Britain

Meet the heiresses.

Their dresses are the latest fashion, their rooms Mayfair's most luxurious, their suitors Britain's most powerful men.

Their fortunes – blood and sugar.

'A sobering and significant achievement, this is a book you need to read.' Lucy Worsley

Georgian heiresses are inescapable in British culture. They flutter through Jane Austen’s novels and countless period dramas. Their portraits – painted by Gainsborough, Zoffany, Reynolds – crowd our museums while their lavish estates pepper the countryside. However, a less genteel story lurks beneath the veneer – those glorious balls, dresses and dowries were funded by the exploitation of enslaved men, women and children.

Following the lives of nine heiresses and tracing their tainted money from its origins in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, Miranda Kaufmann reveals a murky world of inheritance, fortune-hunting and human exploitation. From Jane Leigh Perrot, Jane Austen’s light-fingered aunt, to Elizabeth Vassall Fox, who faked her daughter’s death to maintain custody during a tumultuous divorce, Heiresses traces the often scandalous lives of the women who helped build Britain’s empire.

Kaufmann also pieces together the lives of the people these heiresses and their families enslaved. There’s Betsy
Newton, who escaped from Barbados to London to confront her enslavers face-to-face. Meanwhile in Jamaica, Susanna Augier became a powerful landowner, inheriting her white father’s properties. Her daughter, an eligible heiress, would marry into the British aristocracy.

Enlightening, provocative and masterfully researched, Heiresses offers a vital history of enslavement in Britain and the Caribbean.

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'A startling insight into the lives of the real “Mrs Rochesters”. The role of women in plantation slavery, as perpetrators and victims is uncovered by a historian at the height of her powers.' Anita Anand, author of The Patient Assassin and co-host of Empire

'A perfect balance of critical humour and searing historical insight. A must-read.' Paterson Joseph, actor and author of The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho

'Vivid, shocking and compulsively readable. Miranda Kaufmann is not just a fine investigative historian – she is a superb story-teller.' Alex Renton, author of Blood Legacy

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