Andrea Stuart was born and raised in the Caribbean. She studied English at the University of East Anglia and French at the Sorbonne. Her book The Rose of Martinique: A Life of Napoleon's Josephine was published in the United States in 2004, has been translated into three languages and won the Enid McLeod Literary Prize. Stuart's work has been published in numerous anthologies, newspapers and magazines, and she regularly reviews books for The Independent. She has also worked as a TV producer.
Stuart (The Rose of Martinique: A Biography of Napoleon's Josephine) uses her own family history to flesh out the political, economic, and social history of Barbados, where she was born. Beginning with a white maternal ancestor who left England in the late 1630s, she traces her family's mixed-race heritage to the present day. In the process, she addresses the sugar trade and slavery in Barbados, the triangle trade, and the impact of the sugar trade on Britain and the world. While Elizabeth Abbott's Sugar: A Bittersweet History details the far-reaching story of this commodity, other recent books more broadly examine the sugar trade and slavery or focus on a different region, e.g., Richard S. Dunn's Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies or Richard Follett's The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana's Cane World. Verdict Although the book is well researched, a limited written record of the family forces Stuart to be hypothetical at times: she cannot provide the same level of detail for the African as for the white side of her family, owing to the weaker archival record. It's the personal story that makes this book both powerful and especially intriguing. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the history of the British Americas and Barbados, slavery, or family sagas.-Leslie Lewis, Duquesne Univ. Lib., Pittsburgh (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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