The introduction presents an overview of the book’s argument and the theoretical framework that guides the project. It also lays out the contributions the book will make to the historical literature of slave resistance. The argument is that enslaved women resisted slavery with lethal force and when they did so, their own ideas about injustice were a central motivation. A new Black feminist theory is introduced and outlined: the Black feminist practice of justice. The core tenets of this philosophy includes the women prioritizing their perspective and how they defined justice, understanding the stark lack of justice in the judicial system, Black women’s rationality and prior planning, proportionality, a concept of “just deserts,” and their resignation to accept their fates for exercising lethal force.

Mary Howitt, Anna Mary Howitt, and Elizabeth Gaskell, who knew Jameson, extended her cross-cultural exchange across several genres left untouched by their precursor. Unlike Jameson, Howitt’s and Gaskell’s maternal roles were factors in their Anglo–German exchange. Mary Howitt authored a young adult novel set in Heidelberg (Which is the Wiser?) in which ethnoexocentrism is central to courtship. Another novella, Margaret von Ehrenberg, the Artist-Wife, drew upon her daughter Anna Mary’s experiences and writings as an art student in Munich; it addresses troubled marriage and the importance of professions for women. Anna Mary Howitt’s memoir An Art-Student in Munich is structured by the writer’s growth from narrow English national and religious identity to openness to Germans’ cultural, class, and religious differences, and by her movement from a marginalised foreign female art student to her acceptance as a German art student at the climactic artist’s ball. Gaskell adapts Anglo–German cultural exchange to probe the dangers posed by intercultural courtship and to innovate gender reversals in female and male characters in two short stories that draw on sensation fiction and German idyl.

This chapter reads the canonical novel Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot, and lesser-known novel The First Violin, by Jessie Fothergill, in conversation with each other and with the fiction of German-Jewish author Paul Heyse, to which a single episode of Eliot’s may be indebted, while Fothergill draws on Heyse’s 1873 Kinder der Welt throughout in plot, structure, and gendered characters. Both British novels feature dual narrators and plots and exemplify Anglo–German exchange, especially in relation to opera and German music. But whereas Gwendolyn Harleth fails at a music career and marriage, Fothergill’s first five of six books comprise a New Woman plot of a single woman refusing mercenary marriage to pursue a career: protagonist and English narrator May Wedderburn studies music abroad, with the talent and drive to succeed, and lives alone. The sixth book, however, modulates from a New Woman story to heterosexual romance and marriage. Complicating this outcome are Fothergill’s dual plot and her second, male German narrator, the romantic friend of the novel’s protagonist, the German concertmaster whom May loves. The novel thus mixes heterosexual romance, queer masculinity, and queer romance, giving male love the last word and qualifying conventional Victorian happy endings.

This chapter offers a narrative and descriptions of the plot, its participants and purposes, of the Cato Street locality and the conspirators’ weaponry, of the gathering in the Cato Street stable on 23 February 1820, of informers in the group.