Phillips, Caryl

New York. 1992. February 1992. Knopf. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Slightly Worn Dustjacket With A Small Tear At The Top Spine. 0679405321. 184 pages. hardcover. Jacket painting: ‘Brazilian Landscape’ by Frans Jansz. Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson. keywords: Literature Caribbean Black England . FROM THE PUBLISHER - Two nineteenth-century worlds connected by the insult of slavery are explored in this powerful and haunting novel: the Caribbean plantation hierarchy in all its shades of prejudice, and England at a time when, though slavery had been officially abolished, ‘bird and beast' shops in London sold African children like pets. To begin: we read the journal of Emily Cartwright, a thirty-year-old spinster, dispatched by her father to visit his sugar estate in the West Indies. For Emily, a model of orderly English womanhood, her finely honed sense of propriety and fashionably ‘liberal' ideas about slavery are little preparation for the ‘tropical backwater of the Americas' In prim, cool prose she describes the island life around her, but the controlled surface of her words cannot mask her growing sensual and psychological turmoil - the complication of her attraction toward and revulsion from the lush, alien, often frightening, and insidiously seductive world she has entered, and the profound changes it forces in her. Chief among the agents of change are Arnold Brown, the brutal estate manager, who slowly wins Emily's mind and heart; and Cambridge, the unbending slave who fears no one - not the ‘massa's' daughter, and not Brown, with whom he is locked in a vicious struggle for dignity, spirit, and, finally, life itself. And it is Cambridge who closes the book, telling the story of his life: the brief happiness of his childhood before he was sold into slavery; his education, Christianisation, and eventual emancipation at the hands of his first master in England; his second capture by slave traders, and the events on the island that have led to the death sentence he now faces. It is the shifting perspective of the brilliantly realized voices of Emily and Cambridge that reveals not only the dramas of life on one particular slave plantation but also the underpinnings of the moral hypocrisy that allowed such a system to exist. inventory #37900 ISBN: 0679405321.