The Analysis of The Book "The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh" by Linda Colley

The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh

Linda Colley’s The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh is a detailed narrative of the life Elizabeth Marsh and her historical social influence during the 18th century. Colley captures aspects of the events in Elizabeth Marsh’s time as she continuously travels in hopes of living a fulfilling life. She takes an exceptional stand in the genre of this book, not only because of her profession in the history of Britain since the 1700’s, but because of her admiration for the writings and teachings of events and persons of this time.

The excerpt in the title: “the ordeal” plainly states the purpose of the book, which is to convey the occurrences in Marsh’s life and how they are widely unknown, but vastly influential on sociality in this day and age. Starting with Marsh’s Early life, born in the later year of 1734 in England by a British shipwright father and her Jamaican mother, she became widely exposed to the Royal Navy and the British State in Portsmouth. With a hectic childhood mostly spent at sea or on nearby docks, she was exposed to much diversity and sickness. With this being an unhealthy environment for her entire family, they moved when she about nineteen years old, and Elizabeth proceeded to leave her family and travel to England.

Her roots being at sea lead her to set sail aboard her own ship which was further taken over. Her capturers further lead her to Morocco where she was placed in the Sultan Company. She was saved by a “fake marriage” to a man named James Crisp who protected her from the Sultan Company shortly after she arrived. This lead to an actual marriage of the two, but with family and financial complications, they were often split from each other and their children. Elizabeth chose to continue traveling from Dhaka and further faced many trials and tribulations at sea. She was gone for far more than a year, but decided to return home. As she returned home, her mother and father soon died and left her with nothing.

As well, James died to with no will in place either, so she decided to remarry to care for her children. She began to feel ill and discovered she had breast cancer, but kept it to herself until her children could move away. By the time it was treated, she fell too sick and died some time in 1875.In conclusion, her economic background was not profoundly stable, and her will to travel and discover a better life demonstrates many complex societies filled with war, disease, and oppression which was demonstrated by: “Now that war was spilling over into different continents, the resulting dispersal of Britain’s naval resources left traditional European frontier sites like Menorca more exposed and potentially vulnerable”.

Colley does a tremendous job of presenting the perspective of all of this by telling of Marsh’s journeys aboard a ship as she moves from place to place such as Portsmouth, Jamaica, Gibraltar, Morocco, and the Navy Office.Just as well, she incorporates details of her husband’s life with his business in Florida and India. Colley’s obvious goal is to illustrate the events and history of this particular woman and how it was all factored by war, large scale world happenings, and her overall exposure to life at sea.

This book seems to shift by different points or large-scale changes in Marsh’s life.Each chapter seems to begin a somewhat new chapter for Elizabeth and the difficulties she encounters as she travels and deals with her different financial and family based situations. This is because different countries had different living conditions and different beliefs on servants and slavery which is displayed by Colley in one excerpt which denounces: “The 157 inhabitants of Port Royal who were registered as slave-owners in 1738 laid claim on average to nine slaves apiece”, and demonstrates the power of the people and standards of living in different locations such as Jamaica and Morocco.

The flow of the narrative separates the different aspects of society for Marsh but brings them together as a whole in telling the story. Overall, the book in its entirety is a detailed narrative that demonstrates and lays out the standards of living and bravery of Elizabeth Marsh in her journey around the world. It is a well written story of her life as a whole and reveals her performance in history. It provides the locations, population, race, religion, and many events including natural disasters, wars and other influential occurrences of all the places she inhabited in her lifetime. It also contains lots of information on different societies and how they are structured based on factors that affected her individually in these different places.

This book is for fanatics of history in the 1700’s and those who find interest in different viewpoints and standards of living in a vast amount of locations around the globe. The text was written chronologically and grasped the reader’s attention an exceptional amount of times. The book was considerably lengthy, but all points were demonstrated thoroughly. Although the occasional turn to her husband and other kin’s life’s or point of views were presented, I feel they were necessary to provide a better understanding of the theme. I enjoyed the book and would recommend it to others that want to learn more about historical figures. In conclusion, Linda Colley’s The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh was a success in telling the history of the 1800’s in many places through the perspective of a courageous woman who experienced such history.