307. Austen vs Brontë: Unmasking Slavery Heiresses

Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William Durumpol. So um, we're doing this series on empire and literature and one of the things that's really striking, Willie, is actually bits of empire that are completely absent. from literature and y you know, that's a real thing for you, isn't it? Well, not just bits.

It's extraordinary because over the course of, you know, 300 years, the British kind of invaded almost everywhere. I've just checked and there are only 22 countries in the world that the British didn't invade. So much so that freedom from British rule is the single most popular secular festival anywhere in the world. Every six days somewhere celebrates freedom from British rule. Independence Day.

Independence Day. And yeah, if you look in British, you know, domestic English literature of the period, it's almost completely absent to a to a weird extent looking, uh looking from our point of view in the present. There are hints of it in the back of Thackeray, there's Ian Forster, there's a little bit of Kipling, echoes of it at the, you know, the background of Sherlock Holmes, but most novels of the period do not deal with it. There is a small body that do that, and they're analyzed in post-colonial literature classes.

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