The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History
In this remarkable reconstruction of an eighteenth-century woman's extraordinary and turbulent life, historian Linda Colley not only tells the story of Elizabeth Marsh, one of the most distinctive travelers of her time, but also opens a window onto a radically transforming world.Marsh was conceived in Jamaica, lived in London, Gibraltar, and Menorca, visited the Cape of Africa and Rio de Janeiro, explored eastern and southern India, and was held captive at the court of the sultan of Morocco. She was involved in land speculation in Florida and in international smuggling, and was caught up in three different slave systems. She was also a part of far larger histories. Marsh's lifetime saw new connections being forged across nations, continents, and oceans by war, empire, trade, navies, slavery, and print, and these developments shaped and distorted her own progress and the lives of those close to her. Colley brilliantly weaves together the personal and the epic in this compelling story of a woman in world history.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
There were many ordeals—and adventures—in the tumultuous life of this emblematic 18th-century Englishwoman. At age 20 Marsh was captured by Barbary pirates and narrowly fended off the Moroccan sultan's attempts to induct her into his harem. She married a British merchant, went through both luxurious high living and humiliating bankruptcy, followed him to India, where they remade themselves as colonial grandees, then suffered another bankruptcy. (A further ordeal was snagging a husband for her under-dowried daughter.) Historian Colley (Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850) styles Marsh a female Candide batted about by world-historical forces. Shaped by the breakdown of barriers in this age of proto-globalization (Colley speculates excitedly, but without evidence, that Marsh was of mixed racial background), her life was opened up by the rise of the British Empire and disrupted by attendant upheavals like the Seven Years War and the American Revolution. Still, in Colley's account, she retains her own power: Marsh cannily leveraged family connections to the British naval bureaucracy to facilitate her voyaging, published a piquant memoir of Moroccan captivity and enjoyed a scandalous 18-month tour of India accompanied by a dashing, unmarried British officer. Colley makes of her story both an engaging biography and a deft, insightful social history. Photos. (Aug. 14)
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From Bookmarks Magazine
Linda Colley, a history professor at Princeton, first encountered Elizabeth Marsh while researching her previous book, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850. Using the scant sources available, Colley fleshes out this long-forgotten woman’s extraordinary life, which was frequently shaped by world events: war, commerce, imperialism, and global shifts of power. Unfortunately, the lack of personal papers means that readers never really get to know Marsh. However, Colley’s intention here is "recasting and re-evaluating biography" to deepen our understanding of the "global past," and she brings Marsh’s world and the forces shaping it vividly to life. Instead of portraying a life played out against world history, Colley turns the genre on its head and presents world history as it played out in a single life.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
A globe-trotter, well ahead of her time, Marsh lived a life of travel and adventure few eighteenth-century women could even imagine. The daughter of a shipwright, she spent much of her youth at sea on British warships. Captured and taken to Morocco in 1756, she later escaped and wrote and published a book about her ordeal as a would-be member of the sultan's seraglio. Rather than restrict her wanderlust, marriage opened up new vistas for Marsh. Sailing to India to join her husband, she managed stops in exotic ports of call along the way. Once in India, she traveled overland, chronicling the sights and sounds of her extraordinary journey in an intimate travelogue. Make room on the shelves in the women's history collection for this robust portrait of a forward-thinking woman well ahead of her time. Flanagan, Margaret
Customer Reviews
for people who love history
A great book -- I discovered it from my History Book Club, before the great reviews poured in from the critics. I think the New York Times had it as one of its ten best at the end of the year. For all persons interested in women's history, biography, India, Caribbean. Shows how much certain intrepid souls traveled in days of yore. And a rarity in those days--tales written by a woman. The author has done her research carefully & thoroughly; text is easy to follow, not boring. Loved the fact that she was related to Edmund Burke.
The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh
This was one of the worst books I have ever read. It reads like a Ph.D. thesis - with some sentences being 2 and 3 lines long. There is nothing said by the heroine - just about her - and in a most tedious descriptive manner, often confusing (since her mother shared her name). Boring boring boring. I gave up after half of the book was finished. It was a Christmas gift to me and I will donate it to our local University - perhaps some student of history or genealogy would be interested. I am certainly not.
Neither biography nor history but a curious speculation, of sorts
Professor Colley has done a lot of research on Britain's 18th century world, and this book has come out of that. She presents an extraordinary interweaving of naval history, commerce, the status of women, slavery, and the emergence of the USA, among other subjects. I like the way she is upfront about her speculation about Elizabeth Marsh. As she goes along she makes it clear what is in the record, what she believes would have been typical of the era, and what she is only guessing at. Very admirable. But I found the book dry in places. A little more scholarly than I was in the mood for.
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