Hospitality

Abstract

Jane Austen and I are both daughters of the Empire. Her Empire was the Napoleonic one, where the ladies wore their waists under the armpits; and mine is the one on which the sun never sets, the one that used to show as pink on maps of the world. My particular outpost of the Empire, Kenya, was more like Jane Austen’s world than is our modern-day democratic society, North America or of modern-day England, because in the early years of this century the British had managed to transpose the nineteenth-century class system into twentieth-century Africa. The whites lived as country gentry, and among themselves preserved a rigid hierarchy. The colonial administrators of my parents’ generation know all about Rank, and a fair amount about Blood. They cared who led the way in to dinner, and who sat on whose right, and what it was proper and not proper to say to whom. Lady Catherine de Bourgh would have been thoroughly at home.

(Note: This talk was originally delivered as a dinner address to the Jane Atisten Society of North America, which was held in Toronto, Canada. Rather than delete mention of the outposts of Empire, I have chosen to retain the few references to the occasion.)