The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh

Continuing the New York Times Book Review 10 Best of 2007...

The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh is a biography unlike any I have ever read before. I love a good biography, tracing a life from birth (or usually the subject's ancestry) all the way to death (I avoid biographies of living people, because the ending hasn't been written yet). However, this book is quite different, and not satisfying in the way I'm used to. It is a terrific example of research, but I found myself distanced from the subject.

Why? Well, there's not much known about Elizabeth Marsh. She was a woman born in 1735 and ended up extremely well-traveled. She wrote a book called The Female Captive which is pretty much unknown (there's only one copy that exists). The author of this book, Linda Colley, is chasing not so much a ghost as a cypher.

Colley, undeterred, instead creates a biography from the outside in, sketching around her subject through the conditions in which she lived, bringing Marsh to life. It is at times a pretty fascinating life. Marsh was conceived in Jamaica, possibly of mixed race. She was born in England to a seafaring family in Portsmouth, England, and then spent much of her childhood in Menorca, Spain. As a young woman she was captured by a Moroccan corsair and held hostage by the Sultan of Morocco. Later, she married a trader who was also a part-time smuggler and land speculator who at one time owned a large parcel of land in Florida, though they never lived there. Instead they eventually went to India, where she traveled extensively without him.

Colley subtitles this book "A Woman in World History," and this is where the book shines, as it touches on a diverse group of topics that touched Marsh's life, including Moroccan harems, smuggling on the Isle of Man, salt agencies in India and how mastectomies were performed without anesthetic (Marsh died of breast cancer). Colley also ably demonstrates how even in the mid-eighteenth century the world was getting small. The British government's financial difficulties on the Indian subcontinent prompted them to raise taxes in the American colonies, which led to a revolution (which Colley claims was really a world war, involving the French, Spanish and Dutch as well).

For hard-core history buffs, this stuff is fascinating, but I missed the human touch. Colley does her best to let us know what Elizabeth Marsh was like, but it's an uphill climb. There are no images of her, and though she wrote a book and left a diary of her travels in India, she remains pretty much an obscured slate. In a way, the book is touching in a different way, in that someone who was such an independent spirit will always remain an enigma.