Friday, March 2, 2012

A life across the continents ; The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh By Linda Colley HARPERPRESS [pound]25 (363pp)

Historian Linda Colley first came across her latest biographicalsubject when she was researching Captives, her acclaimed study ofBritons enslaved overseas. At first glance Elizabeth Marsh seems acurious choice, being neither rich nor notable for her achievements,but she travelled more widely than virtually any woman of her eraand in the course of her globe-trotting "was repeatedly caught fastin geographically wide-ranging events and pressures". The result iswhat the author calls a "global biography ": one that places herheroine in the context of the vast social shifts of her age.

Born in 1735, Elizabeth Marsh was one of those people to whomhistory just kept happening. She was conceived in Jamaica, a smallbut imperative cog in the expanding Empire. She made the first ofher journeys in utero to England, her father's homeland. He was aship's carpenter and her mother a young Creole widow. The familysettled in Portsmouth, where the constrained circumstances of lifein the "lower middling" strata were obviated by a well-placed unclewhose patronage improved relatives' opportunities and wealthfinanced their children's education.

In 1755, when Marsh was 20, he procured a new position for herfather in Menorca. She chose to accompany her parents, but thefollowing year made the return journey to England alone. Her shipwas captured by pirates and she ended up a hostage of the Sultan ofMorocco, Sidi Muhammad. Realising that the Sultan planned to add herto his seraglio, Marsh deployed both flattery and subterfuge(pretending marriage to her fellow captive, James Crisp) in order toescape concubinage. But even though there was no sexual misconduct,the interlude irretrievably tarnished her reputation. She was, afterall, a young woman who had travelled without an escort, spent timewith a notoriously priapic - and not unattractive - foreigner, andpretended to be married to a man who was not even her fiance.

The only solution was to marry James Crisp in reality, which heenthusiastically agreed to do. Her marriage to the prosperous youngtrader was initially auspicious. They bought a house in London, hada couple of children and spent money freely. But the life of awheeler-dealer in 18th-century England was as precarious then astoday and Crisp's more questionable dealings - smuggling - broughthim down. Officially bankrupt, Crisp and his mortified wife migratedto Florida where they embarked on a doomed land-development scheme.

The Crisp family had run out of chances. He fled to India toreinvent himself, and Elizabeth and her children moved back toChatham. Desperate and hard-up, she published an account of heradventures in Morocco. The Female Captive was a commercial success,though one reviewer, hoping for more salacious revelations, sniffedthat it "contained no very interesting incidents". But its authorwas financially afloat and she used the funds to set off in pursuitof her husband.

On arrival in India she sent her daughter back to England, whileher son came out to join her. The boy arrived "almost destroyed withvermin and filth", and was swiftly apprenticed to a Persianmerchant. Unable or unwilling to rekindle the marital fires,Elizabeth, now in her forties and unencumbered by childcare, decidedto go travelling throughout Eastern India with a "cousin". Herdiary, replete with tales of balls and card parties, does not revealthe nature of her relationship with this man. Colley, who speculatesabout the lax morals of the Anglo -Indian scene, makes it clear whatkind of relationship she believes it to be. Though the travelscontinued, the final act of Marsh's life saw her resettle inEngland, where she ended her days.

Dramatic though Elizabeth Marsh's story is, it never quitedelivers the emotional impact one would expect. This is partly dueto a lack of material: there are no surviving letters and Marsh'sdiaries are not of the revelatory, soul-baring variety that evokeempathy.

There is also an emotional distance that seems deliberate:Colley's goal is to tell a global story first and an individualnarrative second. She has turned on its head the convention oftraditional biography, in which political and economic forces areanalysed in order to elucidate our understanding of the subject, infavour of using an individual story to illustrate our global past.The most fascinating parts are Colley's brilliant, eclectic asides:intellectual seasoning on the motivations of migration, or the roleof the Navy in the expansion of empire, or the class constraints onwomen's travel writing.

This book is also important in another way. Instead of being bornof the labyrinthine archives so intrinsic to biographers' lore, itis a product of the internet and other new technologies that allowthe historian and "anyone else" to explore manuscripts, literarycatalogues and genealogical websites across the world. This newbreadth of access, Colley reminds us, would be inconceivable even adecade ago. "The ongoing impact of this information explosion on theenvisaging of history, and on the nature of biography, will onlyexpand in the future."

Andrea Stuart's 'Josephine: the rose of Martinique' is publishedby Pan

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