ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the intersections of British Atlantic culture through the focal point of an English woman colonist. Teresia Constantia Phillips lived in Jamaica and was well known to contemporaries as a courtesan and memoirist, parading her marriages and love affairs with highborn and well-connected men before the English public in a three-volume autobiography. Jamaicans were said to call her the 'black widow', an epitaph that allied her with the malignity, menace and sudden death associated with the Caribbean. Phillips's contested self-fashioning focused and propelled a number of existing anxieties about female sexuality and consumption, male degeneracy and the fungibility of the national identity that circulated in cultural and political circles in the 1740s and 1750s. Phillips's appointment as Mistress of the Revels put her at the apex of social life in Spanish Town and Kingston in the late 1750s, a time of both anxiety and catharsis on the island.
