In Valerie Martin’s novel Property, the disaffected heroine speaks bitterly of the black woman who is her slave. The woman has managed to escape to the north in disguise, before being caught and returned. “She has tasted a freedom I will never know,” Manon Gaudet laments. “She has traveled about the country as a free white man.”
In the antebellum South a slave-owner counts his wife among his worldly possessions. So it is that Manon, white, pretty, and married to a dull, morally bereft plantation owner, longs for escape of her own. But don’t feel sorry for the mistress of the house just yet. In this story, no one, not even the wife trapped in a loveless, icebox of a marriage, is above reproach. The ties, and lies, that bind. Historical fiction’s unvarnished truth.
Guests:
Valerie Martin, author of “Property”