ABSTRACT
This article explores changing constructions and representations of creole masculinity within private and published texts by female authors living in Britain and its colonies during the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. Its analysis of Lady Maria Nugent’s private diary (1801–1805), Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millenium Hall (1762), and The History of Sir George Ellison (1766), Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801), and Mrs William Noy Wilkins’ Slave Son (1854) highlights the ways in which female authors used literary signifiers of creole masculinity to reflect different social attitudes towards British colonial ideology, racial integration, and gender reform in the years immediately preceding the passing of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act (1807) and during the post-emancipatory era following the Act for the Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Colonies (1833).
