Captured by the French Navy!

On 13 August 1794, two young Birmingham women, Mary and Martha Russell, left England on an American merchant ship. The Russell family were dissenters, active members of Joseph Priestley’s Unitarian church and close friends with many of the intellectuals and radical thinkers associated with that church. Their father's open support for the French and American Revolutions had made the family a target for mob violence, culminating in the burning of their home in 1791. Like the Priestleys and a number of other Birmingham radicals, the Russells were on their way to America to make a new life.

Four days into their voyage, however, their ship was captured by a French frigate. For the next four months they were held prisoner in Brest harbour, being moved from ship to ship every few weeks. They were eventually rescued by an American ship's captain who took them to France. Passing as Americans, they spent six months travelling through revolutionary France before finally leaving for America.

Throughout the entire time, Mary and Martha Russell wrote extensive and detailed diaries. Seeing life on shipboard from a woman's point of view, they provide us with a unique insight into late eighteenth century marine experience.

This talk will explore some of the ways in which Mary and Martha Russell used their journals to define and control the experience of captivity, setting this within the context of the relationship between France and England in 1794 and paying particular attention to the status of foreigners in revolutionary France. I will further explore their problematical relationship to the French Revolution as both supporters and prisoners of that revolution and the contradictory nature of their responses.

Dr. Betty Hagglund is a literary historian. Her research focuses on women's writing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, travel writing and literature of social change. She is the author of Tourists and Travellers: Women's Non-fictional Writing about Scotland 1770-1830; Epic Treks; and The Illustrated Atlas of Exploration; and has edited seven volumes of nineteenth-century women's travel writing, the most recent of which was a scholarly edition of the memoirs and Indian travel account of Mary Martha Sherwood (1854).

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Birmingham & Midland Institute, 9 Margaret Street, Birmingham, United Kingdom

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