The UK 2025 Book Tour for Miranda Kaufmann’s Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance and Caribbean Slavery (Oneworld Publications, September 2025) is now underway (see tour dates and book description below). Anita Anand (author of The Patient Assassin and co-host of Empire) writes, “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.”
Heiresses UK Book Tour 2025
Monday 29th September: Wigtown Book Festival
Tuesday 30th September: Waterstones, Glasgow, with Malik Al-Nasir
Wednesday 1st October: The Studio, Nicolson Square Venues, Edinburgh, hosted by Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights (CRER), with Désha Osborne
Thursday 2nd October: The Georgian House, Edinburgh, with Lisa Williams
Thursday 9th October: British Library, with Sudhir Hazareesingh
Saturday 11th October: Birmingham Literature Festival, with Corinne Fowler, Malachi McIntosh and Casey Bailey
Wednesday 29th October: National Gallery, London, with Leslie Primo
Thursday 6th November: Bridport Literary Festival, with Malik Al-Nasir and Paul Lashmar
Thursday 13 November: Mold Library, hosted by Mold Bookshop
Description: 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.
Dr. Miranda Kaufmann is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, part of the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She read History at Christ Church, Oxford, where she completed her doctoral thesis on ‘Africans in Britain, 1500-1640’ in 2011. As a freelance historian and journalist, she has worked for The Sunday Times, the BBC, the National Trust, English Heritage, the Oxford Companion series, Quercus publishing and the Rugby Football Foundation. She is a popular speaker at conferences, seminars and schools from Hull to Jamaica and has published articles in academic journals and elsewhere (including the Times Literary Supplement, The Times, The Guardian, History Today, BBC History Magazine and Periscope Post). She enjoys engaging in debate at the intersection of past and present and has been interviewed by the BBC, Sky News, Al Jazeera USA and the Observer.
Contact her via @MirandaKaufmann or via www.mirandakaufmann.com
For purchasing information, see https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0861548019
The UK 2025 Book Tour for Miranda Kaufmann’s Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance and Caribbean Slavery (Oneworld Publications, September 2025) is now underway (see tour dates and book description below). Anita Anand (author of The Patient Assassin and co-host of Empire) writes, “A startling insight into the lives of the real “Mrs Rochesters”. The role of women in plantation slavery, as perpetrators
