Augusta Zelia Fraser

[6][12] William was an officer in the 17th Lancers for a time, but later left to explore South Africa, where he hunted big game and grew acquainted with David Livingstone.

Augusta's son, Charles Ian Fraser (born 6 April 1903)[19]), would inherit Newstead and Cowton through his mother and Reelig through his father.

[18] In 1892, three years after they were married, Augusta left with Philip for Jamaica—then still a colony of the British Empire—where he was to supervise the construction of a rail project as surveyor-general and inspector.

Hopes were high that railway development would kick-start the struggling economy, then reeling from a shock due to a substantial decline in the price of sugar.

[22] An 1893 court case, which went all the way to the Privy Council, reveals that among Philip's responsibilities at the railway was to scout land for new construction—presumably, then, he would have travelled widely throughout the island.

[32] 'Afro-Jamaicans', who, Buckridge notes, were 'often viewed through the lens of negative racial stereotyping carried over from slavery', typically experienced the most limited social opportunities.

[32] The Jamaica Fraser chronicled, then, was suffering economically and riven by racial divides carried over from slavery, which had ended formally just over 50 years before she arrived.

Rosenberg argues that Fraser both 'exploited' her servants for literary material and 'assert[ed] her own superiority through imperialist conceptions of race, gender, and class'.

[35] Gohrisch concurs, arguing that Fraser's work is 'ingrained with the views of a British upper-middle-class woman looking down at both racially and socially inferior colonial 'Others'.

[37] Bryan, by contrast, views Fraser as both an advocate of what he calls 'racial separation'—the distinct, largely isolated development of Black and white societies—and of 'racial determinism': the theory that a person's race is a primary factor in explaining their 'behaviour'.

The two-volume work tells the story of British-born Lucilla St. John's experiences on the fictional island of San José, transparently modelled on Jamaica,[33] where she has come to teach music and French.

Lucilla marries Isidore da Costa, a wealthy 'coloured' man, but later regrets her decision, abandons the marriage, and ultimately returns to England.

Contemporary critics of the novel agreed that the title character was neither good nor likeable: The Spectator called her 'narrow-brained, shallow-hearted, indolent, and ill-conditioned';[40] The Standard, 'not in any sense a nice girl'.

A reviewer for The Morning Post, careful to note that Lucilla was not a 'book[] with a purpose', wrote:More than one clever author has written of life in the West Indies, but this is perhaps the first book treating especially of the state of local feeling regarding marriages contracted between persons of European extraction and those of mixed blood.

American novelists tell of the persistent antagonism existing between the races at all points where the freed African has been promoted to the political privileges of the white man.

But it is less generally known that emancipation of far older date in the West Indian Islands has scarcely been more successful in bringing about the social amalgamation of the two races.