BWWF26: The Real Mrs Rochesters - Caribbean Heiresses in the Brontës' Britain

In Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre, Mr Rochester marries the daughter of a West India planter and merchant in Spanish Town, Jamaica, for a large sum of £30,000...

To coincide with our 2026 exhibition The Colonial Brontës, we're hosting an insightful conversation with historian Miranda Kaufmann. Her latest book, Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance and Caribbean Slavery (2025), follows the lives of nine heiresses, tracing their tainted money from its origins in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. Kaufmann reveals a murky world of inheritance, fortune-hunting and human exploitation.

Dr. Miranda Kaufmann is the author of the Wolfson History Prize and Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize-shortlisted book Black Tudors: The Untold Story (2017). She read History at Christ Church, Oxford and is now an Honorary Fellow of the University of Liverpool, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, where she co-convened the What's Happening in Black British History? workshop series from 2014 to 2022. Miranda also served as Lead Historian for the Colonial Countryside project with National Trust houses from 2019 to 2021; and has taken her work into schools with her Teaching Black Tudors project and to the world with her Black Tudors: The Untold Story course with FutureLearn. 

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