Provisional Benevolence: Gender and Plantation Landscapes

The Department of English, Center for the Study of Slavery and Its Legacies, and Georgetown Humanities Initiative hosted a lecture by Patricia A. Matthew (Montclair State University).

As one of the first public causes around which British white women organized themselves, Britain’s abolitionist movement operationalized benevolence as a regulatory tool to mitigate the country’s anxiety about Black emancipation.

Professor Matthew’s book-in-progress (What Sugar Taught Us: Gender, and the Afterlives of Abolition, under contract with Princeton University Press), shows what that project looked like in portraits, literature, and decorative porcelain and explores rejoinders to this propaganda as it is represented in contemporary Black art. In this talk from the book’s final chapter, she considers how plantation landscapes, particularly provision grounds, are represented across a range of literary texts and material objects in service to 18th and 19th century feminine sensibilities. She analyzes prose and poetry by Adeline Mowbray and Maria Edgworth, the evolution of Josiah Wedgwood’s kneeling Black figure, and the plantation map “Plan of a Section of Belvidere Estate” to complicate the notion of the benevolent abolitionist and to recontextualize Wedgwood’s partnership with Harlem Toile designer Sheila Bridges.

About Patricia A. Matthew

Patricia A. Matthew is associate professor of English at Montclair State University where she teaches courses in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Her research has been published in Women’s Writing, the Keats-Shelley Journal, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language. She has written about race, the Regency and popular culture for The Atlantic, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Times Literary Supplement, and Slate.

She is also an editor and an expert in higher ed diversity and inclusion. Her editing work includes special issues of the journals (Romantic Pedagogy Commons, European Romantic Review, and Studies in Romanticism); the edited volume Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure (University of North Carolina Press, 2016); and the Oxford University Press book series Race in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture.

Her Wondrium lecture “Reading Pride and Prejudice in the 21st Century” is on Audible. She is the editor of Penguin Random House Deluxe Editions of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey (forthcoming September 2025) and is editing Mansfield Park for Norton Classics. She was a 2020-2021 Center for Diversity Innovation Distinguished Visiting Scholar at SUNY Buffalo, the 2022-2023 Anthony E. Kaye Fellow at the National Humanities Center, and won the British Association for Romantic Studies’ 2024 Open Fellowship.

In 2023, she founded the Race and Regency Lab to develop collaborative approaches for understanding how race operates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is currently a long-term fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library.