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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Prisoners of Hope: A Tale of Colonial Virginia," Mary Johnston intricately weaves a narrative that transports readers to the turbulent times of the early American colonies. Set against the backdrop of Virginia's lush landscapes and challenging societal norms, the novel offers a rich blend of historical fiction and romance that highlights the human spirit's resilience. Johnston's prose is characterized by vivid descriptions and a focus on character development, drawing readers into the emotional lives and conflicts of her multifaceted characters. This work is not only a reflection of the colonial era's struggles but also an exploration of themes such as freedom, desire, and moral conflict, which resonate with the socio-political climate of her time. Mary Johnston, an influential author in the early 20th century, was known for her progressive views and advocacy for women's rights. Her personal experiences living in Virginia and her strong connection to the regional history undoubtedly fueled her passion for storytelling, compelling her to depict the complexities of life during the colonization period. Johnston's background as a suffragist often informs her narratives, allowing her to explore the intersections of gender and power within the context of historical events. "Prisoners of Hope" is a compelling read for those interested in American history, richly crafted characters, and the interplay of personal and societal struggles. Readers will find in Johnston's narrative a window into the heart of colonial Virginia that is both enlightening and evocative, making it a valuable addition to any literary collection. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Prisoners of Hope: A Tale of Colonial Virginia
Table of Contents
Introduction
In a raw and contested colony where bondage, duty, and desire converge, Prisoners of Hope: A Tale of Colonial Virginia follows men and women who struggle to claim dignity and love within the tightening grip of authority, nature, and necessity, testing the boundaries between obedience and defiance as the promise of a new world collides with the weight of old-world hierarchies, so that hope itself becomes both a refuge and a chain.
Mary Johnston, an American novelist from Virginia, published this historical novel in the late nineteenth century, early in a career that would bring her wide readership for colonial-era fiction. Set in early colonial Virginia, the book belongs to the tradition of adventure-inflected historical romance, drawing readers into settlements and plantations shaped by English rule and Atlantic ties. Its attention to landscape, custom, and social order evokes a world before the Revolution, when the colony’s identity was still being formed under distant imperial authority and local ambition.
Without revealing later turns, the premise centers on people entangled in the colony’s systems of power—some bound by terms of service, others by allegiance, all constrained by laws, expectations, and the land itself. The opening movement situates conflicting loyalties and precarious freedoms, as private hopes press against public strictures. Johnston guides the reader through encounters where choice is limited, danger is palpable, and opportunity is unevenly distributed, inviting us to consider how character, circumstance, and chance intersect in a society that promises renewal while enforcing hierarchy.
Readers can expect a measured, evocative narrative voice that balances atmosphere with momentum. Johnston’s style favors clear, formal prose and carefully staged scenes, attentive to gesture, setting, and the cadence of speech typical of historical fiction from her era. The novel moves between intimate moments and broader vistas of colonial life, using the tidewater’s rivers and forests as both backdrop and active presence. Suspense arises less from sensational twists than from escalating pressures—personal, legal, and environmental—that shape decisions and deepen the emotional stakes.
Thematically, the book explores captivity and conscience, the contest between private desire and communal order, and the ways social rank and labor obligations narrow the field of possibility. It considers how power is asserted and resisted in a developing colony, and how hope persists even when the terms of freedom are uncertain. The natural world looms as a testing ground and a resource, a source of beauty and peril that both mirrors and molds human fortunes. In showing these tensions, Johnston probes the costs of belonging in a stratified society.
For contemporary readers, the novel’s questions about autonomy, justice, and responsibility remain resonant. It invites reflection on systems that regulate bodies and futures—how they are justified, how they are contested, and how individuals navigate them. The story also prompts consideration of memory and myth: what it means to look back on an origin story, and how narratives of beginning can conceal conflict as readily as they celebrate promise. In this way, the book offers both a period portrait and an opportunity to examine enduring structures of power.
Approached today, Prisoners of Hope offers an immersive journey into colonial Virginia that is at once reflective and gripping, grounded in careful historical texture and sustained by human stakes that feel immediate. Readers drawn to morally complex settings will find a tale that privileges nuance over spectacle, tracing the subtle turns by which allegiance, affection, and survival align or come apart. As an early work by Mary Johnston, it showcases the historical imagination that would mark her career, while standing on its own as a thoughtful study of constraint, courage, and the fragile routes toward liberty.
Synopsis
In seventeenth-century Virginia, a young colony built on tobacco and strict hierarchies, shiploads of indentured servants and transported prisoners feed a growing labor force. Among them is Godfrey Landless, a political captive from England whose ideals have collided with royal authority. Sold for a term of service, he arrives in a landscape of wide rivers, dense forests, and plantations ruled by a small elite. Johnston opens by sketching the colony’s precarious balance—prosperity paired with fear of unrest—and by tracing Landless’s first steps on American soil, where hope for eventual freedom must coexist with the harsh reality of bondage and surveillance.
Landless is consigned to the household of Colonel Verney, a prominent planter whose estate sits along the river’s bend. There he encounters a cross-section of colonial life: stern overseers, weary field hands, and a refined domestic world centered on the colonel’s daughter, Patricia Verney. The plantation’s order is exacting and paternal, yet vulnerable to rumor and rivalry. Into this setting drifts Sir Charles Carew, a polished, pleasure-loving cavalier whose courtesy veils sharper ambitions. Through quiet scenes—work at the docks, dinners in a candlelit hall, whispered talk among quarters—Johnston establishes relationships, introduces unspoken tensions, and positions Landless within a society that scrutinizes every gesture.
Early conflicts arise from the grind of labor and the contempt some freeborn men hold for the bound. Landless, disciplined and self-contained, reveals competence that both irritates an overseer and attracts wary respect. His calm defiance marks him as different, neither cringing nor rash. Patricia’s curiosity is piqued by his restraint, while Carew’s sleek mockery tests his patience. Small incidents—an order carried out too precisely, a word answered too steadily—hint at larger fault lines. The plantation’s gracious façade conceals an ever-present calculation of status, and Johnston’s narrative lingers on how a few glances, favors, and slights can tilt a man’s fortunes in such a world.
As months pass, murmurs of discontent stir among the servants and transported convicts. Nights bring low-voiced meetings in outbuildings, talk of shortening terms by force, and stories of uprisings elsewhere. Landless, whose English past included political conviction and discipline, hears arguments that echo ideals he once embraced. Yet he sees, too, the cost of reckless bloodshed. A handful of determined leaders press for action, measuring secrecy against desperation. Johnston traces Landless’s dilemma with restraint: he is neither eager to betray companions nor willing to plunge the plantation into chaos. The ground is laid for choices shaped by principle, prudence, and dangerous opportunity.
Sir Charles Carew, moving easily in parlors and gaming rooms, advances schemes of his own. He cultivates Colonel Verney’s favor, flatters society, and circles Patricia with elegant attentions. Behind laughter and dice lies debt, calculation, and a readiness to profit from any upheaval. Landless’s unbending manner rankles him. Through hints and half-truths, Carew nudges suspicion toward the servant, framing him as a man with seditious influence. Johnston shows the tightening net: a misplaced paper, a watchful overseer, guests who observe more than they admit. The plantation itself, with its ordered avenues and distant fields, becomes a stage on which malice and duty quietly contend.
Pressure beyond the plantation compounds the strain. Reports of danger along the frontier, sudden alarms at river landings, and a perilous excursion into the woods draw Landless into practical tests of courage. In crisis he proves steady, and his actions complicate judgments made in drawing rooms. Patricia witnesses conduct that conflicts with rumor; Colonel Verney weighs gratitude against rigid custom; Carew masks annoyance behind polished compliments. Johnston uses these episodes to recalibrate alliances without resolving them. The colony’s vulnerabilities—distance from aid, fragile peace with neighboring peoples, dependence on coerced labor—cast every private quarrel in a sharper light, making personal decisions feel public and perilous.
The servants’ plans gather into a fixed night, when signal and circumstance may open a path toward freedom or disaster. Landless finds himself at the hinge of the design, urged by some to lead and by others to inform. He presses for restraint, seeking to avert violence he believes will ruin all. Meanwhile, Carew’s gambits quicken, and the plantation’s defenses harden under anxious supervision. Johnston narrows the focus: a concealed meeting by the river, a message intercepted, a door left unbarred during a storm. The novel’s tempo rises, drawing characters toward irrevocable moments where intentions and appearances are liable to cruel misreading.
When the long-brewing crisis breaks, it does so in confusion and fear. Torches flare, orders clash, and the line between rebellion and panic blurs. Johnston presents the tumult without sensationalism, emphasizing how swiftly rumor becomes verdict. Landless is thrust to the center—accused, defended, and tested—in a night that interweaves personal enmity with public authority. A confrontation with Carew exposes motives kept hidden behind courtesy. At the same time, news from England and a past long guarded come to bear, reshaping how several lives are judged. The novel’s turning point hinges on recognition and choice, resolving immediate peril while holding back the final reckoning.
In the aftermath, the colony seeks to restore order: inquiries are held, terms enforced or reconsidered, and futures quietly negotiated. Johnston closes by measuring consequence rather than celebrating triumph. Relationships altered by danger must find a new footing, and Landless faces the possibility—still uncertain—of lawful freedom and an honorable standing. Without endorsing vengeance, the narrative affirms endurance, prudence, and the humane use of power. The title’s promise becomes plain: hope itself binds the oppressed to life, yet it can work as a force for justice when tempered by conscience. The final scenes leave the colony intact but chastened, its ideals tested and not undone.
Historical Context
Set principally in seventeenth-century Tidewater Virginia, the novel unfolds along the James, York, and Rappahannock rivers during the Restoration era, when Jamestown served as capital and the plantation frontier pushed westward. Tobacco monoculture dominated land use, labor needs, and credit relations linking planters to London factors. The House of Burgesses, established in 1619, governed alongside a royal governor, while county courts enforced discipline over servants and the enslaved. Disease environments, skewed sex ratios, and high mortality shaped household structures. The book’s world is one of dispersed great houses, small holdings, and perilous outposts abutting Native homelands, where law, custom, and coercion contended to order a volatile society.
Indentured servitude and the headright system, first formalized in 1618, remained central through the 1650s–1670s, importing tens of thousands of English, Irish, and Scots laborers for 4–7 year terms. Contracts bound servants to plantation masters who controlled mobility, marriage, and punishment; mortality, especially before 1660, could reach 30–50% in bad seasons. Notable unrest included the Gloucester County Servants’ Conspiracy (1663). Johnston’s narrative, focused on transported men and women, mirrors this coercive labor regime—its auctions, whippings, and petitions for “freedom dues”—and explores how hope for land and status confronted the realities of bondage, debt, and the planter court system.
The tobacco economy, vulnerable to overproduction and metropolitan policy, convulsed under the Navigation Acts of 1651, 1660, and 1663, which restricted colonial trade to English ships and required European goods to pass through English ports. Price collapses in the 1660s impoverished small planters and servants counting on freedom dues. The Plantation Duties Act (1673) tightened collection and angered riverine counties. Plant-cutting riots erupted in Virginia in 1682 as growers slashed tobacco to force prices up. By depicting indebted planters, warehouse seizures, and dependence on distant factors, the book echoes the material pressures and mercantilist constraints that magnified class fissures in the Chesapeake.
The English Civil Wars (1642–1651), Interregnum, and Restoration (1660) reshaped Virginia’s elite. Royalist refugees—“Cavaliers”—migrated after Charles I’s execution (1649), reinforcing hierarchical culture. Governor Sir William Berkeley served 1642–1652 and again 1660–1677, promoting staple agriculture, Anglican establishment, and tight control over the franchise (notably restricting voting in 1670 to freeholders and householders). Patronage and land patents favored an inner circle. Johnston draws on this milieu of deference, courtly manners, and county-court paternalism, setting conflicts between newcomers and entrenched grandees that foreshadow the crises of the 1670s.
Relations with neighboring Native nations framed frontier life. After the Third Anglo-Powhatan War (1644–1646) and the 1646 treaty line, settlers pressed beyond bounds. The 1675 spiral began with a debt dispute at Thomas Mathew’s plantation in Stafford County, sparking Doeg retaliation and cross-border forays. The killing of Susquehannock envoys during a Maryland parley that year intensified raids into the Potomac and Rappahannock valleys. Governor Berkeley’s caution contrasted with militia impatience. Johnston’s scenes of river forts, musters, and terrified out-settlements evoke this contested borderland, where land hunger, fear, and retaliatory violence entangled colonists and Native polities.
Bacon’s Rebellion (1676–1677) crystallized structural strains in the colony. Nathaniel Bacon Jr., a recent-arrived gentleman and member of the Governor’s Council, demanded a commission to wage aggressive war against neighboring tribes after frontier attacks. Governor Sir William Berkeley, wary of widening conflict and protective of the licensed fur trade managed by favorites, refused. Bacon mustered volunteers, attacked the Occaneechi, and was declared a rebel. On July 30, 1676, at Middle Plantation, he issued the Declaration of the People, condemning “wicked and pernicious councillors,” high taxes, and monopolies. Enslaved Africans, indentured servants, and smallholders joined his ranks, revealing cross-class and cross-racial grievances tied to falling tobacco prices, heavy levies to fund fortifications, and constricted political participation (after the 1670 franchise act). After a brief reconciliation, Bacon’s forces seized power again and on September 19, 1676, burned Jamestown. Bacon died of dysentery on October 26, 1676; leadership fractured. Royal marines and loyalist forces, assisted by Captain Thomas Grantham, compelled surrenders in early 1677. Berkeley hanged at least 23 rebels before Charles II recalled him, and a royal commission investigated abuses. The 1677 Treaty of Middle Plantation restructured relations with tributary tribes. Although set as a romance of persons, Johnston’s tale mirrors this upheaval: the arbitrary punishments meted out to lowly laborers, the county-court patronage networks, militia compulsions, and the volatile alliance of the humbly born with ambitious gentry echo the rebellion’s social anatomy and the colony’s pivot toward tighter elite control.
In the rebellion’s aftermath, Virginia accelerated a transition from mixed servitude to entrenched racial slavery. Statutes had already laid foundations: the 1662 partus sequitur ventrem law made slave status inherit through the mother; a 1667 act declared baptism did not confer freedom; the 1691 act punished interracial unions; and the 1705 Slave Codes consolidated a racialized order. These measures narrowed possibilities once shared by poor Europeans and Africans. By contrasting indentured servants’ fragile hopes with the increasingly permanent bondage of Africans, the novel projects how elite anxieties after 1676 hardened race lines to secure labor and forestall cross-class coalitions.
As social and political critique, the book exposes the coercion behind Chesapeake prosperity: the legalized violence of masters, the auctioning of human labor, and the manipulation of courts and parish vestries by an oligarchy. It interrogates mercantilist policy that enriched metropolitan traders while impoverishing producers and spurring disorder, and it portrays frontier policy that externalized costs onto the poor while claiming deference. Gendered vulnerability, especially for servant women, underscores the asymmetry of power. By dramatizing patronage, debt peonage, and the criminalization of resistance, Johnston indicts a regime that fused empire, church, and planter interest into a system that constrained liberty even as it proclaimed it.
