Dimensions
162 x 240 x 37mm
When wealthy plantation owner Cornelius Allen marries off his daughter Clarissa, he presents her with a wedding gift: a young slave woman called Sarah. The two girls have grown up together. But their lives could not have been more different, despite the fact that Sarah is Allen's daughter too - the product of a long-term sexual relationship with his slave Emmeline. When Clarissa's husband rejects her newborn son as illegitimate and sends Clarissa and Sarah back to the Allens, their return sets in motion a series of events that has far-reaching consequences for them both. Told through the alternating view points of Sarah and Theodora Allen, Cornelius's wife, The Wedding Gift shines a glaring light on the brutal world of slavery in the American South. Marlen Bodden's compelling historical novel explores how planters controlled slaves and free women alike, propelling them along a taut social tightrope as they struggled for freedom and autonomy in an oppressive and patriarchal world.
