The woman who fled Barbados for London to confront her enslaver

(Image: Lauren Walker/Truthout)

​When writing my new book, Heiresses, it was important to me to highlight the lives of enslaved people, because we can’t truly understand their significance without considering the human cost of their actions or inaction.

Throughout the book I did my best to piece together fragments of enslaved peoples' stories.
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One woman’s story was so striking that I decided to start Chapter One with her:​

Betsy Newton was enslaved by Lady Sarah Holte (the first heiress I write about in the book) and her sister Elizabeth Newton from 1784 to 1794. By the time she reached London, they were both dead, so she went to see the man who had inherited her and her family, to demand the paperwork confirming freedom for herself and the four young children she had left behind. Thomas Lane admitted she was free by arriving in England,* but refused to help with her children. Betsy remained in London, marrying twice, corresponding with her family in Barbados, and continuing her campaign for her children’s freedom, but to no avail.

Betsy’s chutzpah and determination is quite breathtaking, and just one example of the amazing resilience shown by people fighting to assert their humanity in the most impossible of circumstances that I encountered throughout my research. The callous disregard of the women who inherited her led to her losing five children: the one who died as a newborn, and the four that she was forced to leave behind in Barbados. This is the human cost of enslavement; the damage that still needs repairing today.

If you’d like to hear more about Betsy, her grandmother Mary Hylas, and the rest of their family, please do pre-order my book, Heiresses, Marriage, Inheritance, and Caribbean Slavery,  out 4 September.

​*For more about the legal status of Africans in England, see this article. 

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