Interracial Sexual Desire and Miscegenation in Victoria Cross’s Anna Lombard

Victoria Cross’s (Annie Sophie Cory) fourth and most successful novel Anna Lombard (1901) portrays interracial sexual desire and miscegenation in the British Indian Empire during the late 1800s. The eponymous protagonist is a white Englishwoman whose secret marriage to a dark-skinned Pathan husband and their mixed-race progeny complicate an English officer’s goal of marrying and attaining ideal domesticity with her. Along with anxieties about the Other throughout the British territories, the fear of degeneration and, in particular, miscegenation dominated fin-de-siècle England. Within this historical framework, Cross daringly describes the interracial coupling of a white woman and a native man – a relationship that blurs racial hierarchies crucial for maintaining an empire. Furthermore, in an apparent rejection of English masculinity, the novel depicts an Englishman’s failure in a courtship competition with an (alleged) “savage.” These scandalous and outrageous portrayals of racial relations and gender reversals – commonly, British men had sexual relations with native women and were in control of English women – are unprecedented in either male or female Victorian authors’ literature. This essay argues that Cross’s unique identity as a woman born and raised in India with Anglo-Saxon blood and an English education positioned her in an ambivalent state of hybridity, ideal for bringing an insider’s knowledge of India and England to both cultures. As an AngloIndian woman, Cross was placed in the ambiguous position of both an imperial agent and a subordinate woman. Her own twofold life enabled her to critique not only British stereotypes of Others but also the racial hegemony and the sexual double standards imposed, in particular, upon white women in the imperial colonies. In the process, this essay further argues that Cross expanded upon the New Woman rhetoric – commonly considered pro-imperialistic – by bringing in a criticism of British imperialism, providing an opportunity to overcome racial blindness and to unite beyond race, class, and gender. In the imperial context in which sexuality served as