Omschrijving
The extraordinary story of the British women who made the perilous journey to Jamestown, Virginia, to become wives for tobacco planters in the New Colony.
I love this kind of historical writing, with the stitching showing... Engaged and thoughtful, she has given her women an existence they would recognise.
An evocative and painstakingly researched account of these early female settlers, who have lacked a voice, an identity, even a name, until now. From 400 years ago, they step from these pages and speak to us.
Compelling... A real pleasure to read.
With extraordinary scholarship and painstaking use of contemporary texts Potter succeeds in her professed task of bearing witness to the lives of young women unknown to history... Full of sensational material...
Potter tells the story using a rich range of sources - pamphlets, ballads, sermons - and travels to flesh out gaps... She writes well and hauntingly, of women "penned like chickens in the gloom", of their shock on arrival at a tiny, dilapidated Virginian town thousands of miles from the English capital.
Jennifer Potter is the author of four novels and six works of non-fiction, most recently The Jamestown Brides, The Untold Story of England's 'maids for Virginia' (Atlantic, 2018). Other titles published by Atlantic include The Rose, A True History; Seven Flowers And How They Shaped Our World; and Strange Blooms, The Curious Lives and Adventures of the John Tradescants. A long-time reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement and an accredited Royal Literary Fund (RLF) Consultant Fellow, she currently runs writing workshops for students and staff at British universities and was recently appointed one of the first RLF Writing Fellows at the British Library.