One Brown Girl and ¼ (1909) is a novel by Thomas Mac Dermot. Published under his pseudonym Tom Redcam by the All Jamaica Library, One Brown Girl and ¼ is a tragic story of race and class set in Jamaica. Understated and ironic, the novel critiques the social conditions of Jamaica under British colonialism. Through the character of Liberta Passley, a wealthy woman of mixed racial heritage, Mac Dermot sheds light on the disparities between the island’s black and white communities, crafting a story now recognized as essential to modern Caribbean literature. “‘I?’ said Liberta Passley, ‘am the most unhappy woman in Kingston.’ She was not speaking aloud, but was silently building up with unspoken words a tabernacle for her thoughts. She considered now the very positive assertion in which she had housed this thought, went again through its very brief and enigmatic terms, and then deliberately added the further words: ‘and in Jamaica.’” Despite her beauty, wealth, education, and social standing, Liberta Passley is unable to feel satisfied. Raised as the only surviving daughter of a wealthy Englishman and his formerly-enslaved wife, Liberta feels she must ignore her mother’s side of the family as a means of rejecting her African roots. Manipulating her father, she arranges for her Aunt Henrietta, her mother’s only surviving sister and their loyal housekeeper, to be fired and thrown out. Thinking she is making a decision for her own good, she unwittingly welcomes disaster into her life. This edition of Thomas Mac Dermot’s One Brown Girl and ¼ is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.
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Over de auteur
Thomas Mac Dermot (1870-1933) was a Jamaican poet, novelist, and newspaper editor. Born in Clarendon Parish, he was raised in a family of five children in Trelawny. After receiving his education at Falmouth Academy and at the Church of England Grammar School in Kingston, he remained in the capital to teach and become a journalist. Starting at The Jamaica Post and The Daily Gleaner, he moved to the Jamaica Times, where he would serve as editor for twenty years. In 1899, he launched a popular short story contest for young writers, helping further the careers of famed poet Claude Mc Kay and journalist H. G. de Lisser. By 1903, he established All Jamaica Library, a low-cost series of short fiction by Jamaican authors. Mac Dermot also wrote his own works of fiction under the anagrammatic penname “Tom Redcam.” Becka’s Buckra Baby (1903) is considered a landmark of Jamaican literature and helped distinguish the Caribbean as a hotspot for modern writing. Following his death in England, Mac Dermot was posthumously appointed Jamaica’s first Poet Laureate.