Caribbean plantation life through rose-tinted glasses: the romantic neo-historical novels of Sarah Lark and Michelle Paver

Abstract

This chapter analyses two historical family sagas set in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Caribbean: Sarah Lark’s novels Island of a Thousand Springs (2014) and Island of the Red Mangroves (2015), and Michelle Paver’s trilogy The Shadow Catcher (2002), Fever Hill (2004), and The Serpent’s Tooth (2005). This chapter argues that, despite their romantic and exoticising portrayal of life in the tropics, the novels’ engagement with history is akin to that of neo-historical fiction because both authors embark on a revisionist historical process creating independent and resolute heroines who challenge the wrongness of slavery and put into question the racial, gender, and class hierarchies of the colonial system, thus attempting to offer a reparative reading of British plantation slavery. Nevertheless, this chapter concedes that in their attempt to create a more palatable version of this painful history to their contemporary readers, the novels often trivialise or minimise the actual historical impact of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and plantation slavery in the Caribbean.