Scottish Literature of Migration and Transculturality: Subversive Reticence and Gender Negotiations in Lady Anne Barnard’s Cape Writings

The prevailing perception among scholars identifies the Romantic-period Scottish poet Thomas Pringle as the first South African writer in English during the nineteenth century. However, recent scholarship has brought to light that, well before Pringle’s major works emerged in 1834, another Scot had extensively chronicled the life, culture, and colonial dynamics in the Cape Colony from the late eighteenth-to the early nineteenth century: Lady Anne Lindsay, the wife of colonial secretary Andrew Barnard, with him in South Africa from 1797 to 1802. During this time, she produced poetry, diaries, and letters that warrant deeper critical exploration than they have previously received. This article aims to advocate for the reassessment of Lady Barnard as a significant travel writer whose narratives of exile offer crucial insights into the negotiations and compromises women faced in colonial settings. Specifically, the article endeavors to demonstrate that her Cape writings exhibit a dialectics of the said and unsaid, an ironic tone, and a semantics or poetics of silence unveiling her deliberately ambiguous stance on colonial relations, racial otherness, and slavery. In doing so, Lady Barnard subtly challenges official colonial discourses, contributing to a nuanced understanding of the ambiguities and complexities inherent in colonial contexts.