The cover of one of the many renditions of the Inkle and Yarico stories
Friends,
As a brief follow-up to my blog about the poetry, letters and life of Frances Thynne Seymour, Countess of Hertford, I have placed on academia.edu, my review of a book published in ECCB: An Eighteenth-Century Current Bibliography (Bucknell Press imprint), and link it in here: Dominique Lyndon’s Imoinda’s Shade: Marriage and the African Woman in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, 1759-1808.
The book (I admit here) seriously angered me, and if I hadn’t promised a friend I would do this, I’d probably never have finished the book. I did a lot of reading around the book too. Then I patiently summarized the contexts of a history of very compromising supposedly abolitionist (the nice word is ameliorist) texts).
If anyone is interested, mine is a very readable review about a book justifying or explaining favorably a history of texts that are dismaying — but teach a lesson about white supremacy, a white outlook — very like Lady Hertford’s Ovidian Heriode in the person of Yarico to Inkle — Inkle has sold Yarico and his unborn child into enslavement and she writes of her continuing love for him. The irony is the man writing this book is African-American, and teaches at Princeton: the charitable interpretation, and partly probable reason for his having written this book is he’s trying his best to find something redemptive or inspiring (!) for modern day African-American scholars. I don’t see how it seriously could be.
https://www.academia.edu/43655684/Dominique_Lyndon_Imoindas_Shade_A_Review
You have to think about what you are reading, but the analogies with many 20th and 21st century popular texts about African-America and European conflicts are there, including I now realize the very popular Broadway musical Hamilton (about which a blog will be forthcoming).
On Frank Felsenstein’s English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race and Slavery in the New World, see the comments to the previous blog.
This discreet drawing accompanied the first publication of the Yarico and Inkle story in middle class literature: there are far more salacious ones I don’t care to reprint
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
When it was published, I received the following comment from a fellow scholar and friend: “I am catching up and enjoyed your review of Imolda’s Shade and especially agree with the idea we shouldn’t reformulate history to find something “redemptive” or inspiring in it to ‘help’ blacks (or any other group) feel better (if that is the idea). That brings us back to the heroic narratives that have so long plagued us.”