Click here (and scroll down) to check out the table of contents for Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal, Volume 34 (2012). Anne Mellor and I collaborated on an article entitled Austen’s Fanny Price, Grateful Negroes, and the Stockholm Syndrome in which we argue that the psychological responses of Maria Edgworth’s black slave in her story “The Grateful Negro” (1804) match those of Fanny Price living as a subjugated dependent in Mansfield Park. We focus on the dynamics of gratitude illuminated by Edgeworth’s text, and suggest that Austen, by drawing an analogy between Fanny Price and the “grateful Negro,” is not endorsing an ameliorationist program of benevolent slavery or a self-regulating Christian imperialism, but rather exposing the abject subjectivity produced by such a program.

Many thanks are due to Professor Mellor for her collaboration and support during the writing and editing process!