The Curious Incident of Harriet Smith & the Regency Romany

This little-known corner of Regency historicals hold a special place for me and my family. My debut novel, Always a Princess (the first in a series), features a Romany heroine. Why did I do this?

Always a Princess

I'm glad you asked! 

It's partly in tribute to my Roma family - and partly because of a scene in a Jane Austen novel.

    In Chapter 39 of Austen’s Emma, her bff Miss Harriet Smith (the ‘natural daughter’ of no-one-quite-knows), is accosted by a ‘group of gypsies’.

    It's worth remembering that merely associating with “such a set of people” was judged to be a crime in Regency England. From the 1500s onwards the Crown attempted to rid the land of these ‘other’ residents, deporting them to the colonies and attempting to legislate them out of all existence. By Austen’s time, any ‘consorting’ with ‘gypsies’ was considered a criminal act for which one could be jailed — or worse. One case in 1782 saw a fourteen year old girl hanged for such acquaintance, on the orders of the local magistrate.

    Harriet Smith speaks to the ‘gypsies’, offers them money, and then pleads with them. Miss Smith technically commits a Regency-era crime in this scene. This moment offers a rare glimpse into a Regency England that isn't well-represented in contemporary works.

    The British Empire once spanned a quarter of the known world, but at no point were the native-born colonised people truly deemed to be ‘English’. After all, they didn't actually live in England. At least, not most of them. What if the ‘non-English’ people were not ‘out there’ in the colonies? What if they did, in fact, live in England right alongside the Bertrams, the Woodhouses, the Dashwoods – and even the Bennets?

    The Romany of England are unique here. Their position in Austen's novels is as unusual as their place in Regency England – because they indeed lived, loved, and mattered in the same geographic spaces as Emma Woodhouse and Harriet Smith.

Harriet Smith

The Regency Romany were as present and alive and wonderfully romantic as the Regency English. Coming from a mostly oral tradition, Romany stories from that time are rarely found in print but they were present during this period of English history, and undoubtedly have stories to tell about it.

    In the incident ascribed above, Austen does not specifically accuse the ‘gypsies’ of being heathens, but they are clearly depicted as ‘other’; outside the town limits of Highbury itself and dark, terrifying, criminal, and dangerous. They do not ‘fit’ in Austen’s England, and are cut from Emma’s tale as soon as they serve their meagre narrative purpose: 

“The Gypsies did not wait for the operations of justice: they took themselves off in a hurry.”

    Or rather, the author moved them quickly off her bleached white pages and out of ‘her’ England – despite the truth that there were non-English people present in Austen’s England; other voices with their own perspectives and their own stories worth telling, and worth writing.

    It's difficult to be born into a place that never allows you to become a part of it without a fight, a plea, an effort to assimilate and cut away the parts of you that discomfit the powerful dominant culture all around you. It's more than difficult; it's painful and damaging. The very term ‘marginalisation’ is an admission of the lack of narrative ‘space’ allotted to the voices fiction has chosen to leave unloved, and unnoticed.

    Real history is profoundly unromantic – and yet, somehow, we still try. There is beauty in stories, in narratives of the tales about long-ago lovers and their imagined worlds. There is much solace to be found in story – I love re-reading Austen (although Emma is not my favourite), but in between the wonder of her words, I find myself reading for traces. Traces those whose stories deserve to be told.