Nicole Reynolds

Phebe Gibbes, Edmund Burke, and the Trials of Empire

the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings before the House of Lords, beginning in 1788 and ending in 1795 with an acquittal, was hardly the first crisis in the East India Company’s management of British India, but it nevertheless presented the most comprehensive and sustained public discussion of colonial culpability to that date.1 Reports of the dramatic proceedings, published in the daily press for a national audience, variously distilled and dilated, annotated and embellished what was said before the House of Lords.2 Edmund Burke’s celebrated oratory

BOUDOIR STORIES: A NOVEL HISTORY OF A ROOM AND ITS OCCUPANTS

But I have sometimes thought that a woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is a hall, through which everyone passes in going in and coming out; the drawing room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the inner-most room, holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes. —Edith Wharton, ‘‘The Fullness of Life’’ (14).