The people and events described in this book are not entirely fictitious. James Miranda Barry really did serve as an army doctor from 1813 to 1859. He was a well-known, controversial medical reformer, who quarrelled with Florence Nightingale in public. His ambiguous sexual identity caused considerable speculation and debate during his lifetime. Readers wishing to know more about the facts of his life should consult June Rose’s biography The Perfect Gentleman (Hutchinson, 1977) as I have done. Rachel Holmes is writing a new biography of Barry, so we can look forward to further revelations. Other histories of Barry include Isobel Rae The Strange Story of Dr James Barry (Longmans, Green, 1958) and a novel by Jessica Grove and Olga Racster, Dr James Barry: Her Secret Story (G.Howe, 1932). On the significance of cross-dressing see Marjorie Garber Vested Interests: Cross Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (Routledge, 1992), which includes a section on Barry.
The following texts and reference books were extremely helpful to me. On the life and art of Barry’s ‘uncle’, the painter James Barry, I consulted William L. Pressly The Life and Art of James Barry (Yale University Press, 1981) and his catalogue of The Tate Gallery exhibition James Barry: The Artist as Hero (The Tate Gallery, 1983). For nineteenth-century diseases and their treatments, both what they looked like and what people thought they meant, I studied The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine edited by Roy Porter (Cambridge University Press, 1996). William Cobbett’s Rural Rides, ed. George Woodcock (Penguin, 1967), first published in 1830, gives a vivid impression of the countryside in southern England in the 1820s. I also drew on Gilbert White’s Year: Passages from The Garden Kalendar and The Naturalist’s Journal selected by John Commander (Oxford University Press, 1982). Jennifer Stead’s Food and Cooking in Eighteenth Century Britain and Maggie Black’s Food and Cooking in Nineteenth Century Britain, both published by English Heritage in 1985 were very helpful on cooking and kitchens. I have used Benjamin Robert Haydon’s own words; see Neglected Genius: The Diaries of Benjamin Haydon, ed. John Jolliffe (Hutchinson, 1990). For images and information about nineteenth-century theatre I drew on Simon Trussler’s British Theatre (Cambridge, 1994), and Claire Tomalin’s superb biography of Dora Jordan, Mrs Jordan’s Profession (Penguin, 1995). Also useful and fascinating was Women Reading Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism 1660–1900, eds. Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts (Manchester University Press, 1997). The following texts were especially suggestive for that part of the book set in the West Indies: M. G. Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor 1815–1817 (George Routledge and Sons, 1929), Gad Heumann ‘The Killing Time’: The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (Macmillan Caribbean, 1994), Michael Pawson and David Buisseret Port Royal, Jamaica (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1975) and Mary Turner Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaica Slave Society 1787–1834 (University of Illinois Press, 1982), which gives a detailed historical account of the slave rebellion in 1831. I have drawn on her work in Part Five of the novel and am grateful both to her and to my mother, Sheila Duncker, for their bibliographical help and historical advice. The real James Barry, who was working in Jamaica at the time of the rebellion, wrote: ‘I served under Sir Willoughby Cotton during the Rebellion and the burning of the plantations by the Negroes.’
This book is a work of fiction, an imaginative exploration of particular aspects of what must have been a very strange life. I have therefore taken the liberties which all novelists, who are not strictly historians, always do take with history. Alice Jones is entirely fictional. It did not suit the shape of my story that the painter James Barry should die in 1806, and so I insisted that he should live on until 1816. I hope he will forgive me. Francisco de Miranda lived from 1750 to 1816 and died a prisoner in Spain. I have changed his dates to 1770–1836, as I imagine that he would have liked to see more of the nineteenth century. And I sent him home to die. Barry’s last posting was in Canada. I have decided that he ended his career in Jamaica. It was, in any case, a climate he preferred. Where people have suffered and died in pain, as was the case of the slaves in the West Indies, I have remained as true to known historical fact as possible. As to the inner reality of James Miranda Barry’s life, here we can only guess at the truth, for there is very little evidence. And it is here that the novelist will always have the edge over the historian.
I finished the first draft of James Miranda Barry while I was a visiting fellow at Künstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf in Brandenburg, Germany, during the autumn of 1997. I am grateful to the Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kultur des Landes Brandenburg, who financed my stay in Wiepersdorf and I would like to thank the Director, Frau Doris Sossenheimer, her staff and all the other ‘Stipendiaten’ who were working at Wiepersdorf at that time, especially the painter Sati Zech. My first reader, S.J.D., heard most of this book over the telephone, then carefully read the manuscript. This book and every other book I have written are dedicated to her. I can never thank her enough.
Patricia Duncker
France, 1998