Читать книгу The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: How a Remarkable Woman Crossed Seas and Empires to Become Part of World History - Linda Colley - Страница 7
INTRODUCTION
Оглавление‘I search for Eliza every where: I discover, I discern some of her
features … But what is become of her who united them all?’
ABBÉ RAYNAL
THIS IS A BIOGRAPHY that crosses boundaries, and it tells three connected stories. The first is the career of a remarkable but barely known woman, Elizabeth Marsh, who lived from 1735 to 1785, and who travelled farther and more dangerously by sea and in four continents than any female contemporary for whom records survive. The second story is concerned with members of her extended family, her parents, uncle, brothers, husband, children, multiple cousins and other, more distant, kin. Because of the nature of their occupations, their migrations and their ideas, these people played vital roles in fostering Elizabeth Marsh’s own conspicuous mobility. They also helped to connect her, in both constructive and traumatic ways, with some of the most transformative forces of her age. For this is not just an account of an individual and a family: it is also, and thirdly, a global story. Elizabeth Marsh’s existence coincided with a distinctive and markedly violent phase of world history, in which connections between continents and oceans broadened and altered in multiple ways. These changes in the global landscape repeatedly shaped and distorted Elizabeth Marsh’s personal progress. So this book charts a world in a life and a life in the world. It is also an argument for re-casting and re-evaluating biography as a way of deepening our understanding of the global past.
