Introduction

150
Sabina Fazli
In her legally contested property Lizzie is linked to the Sawab of Mygawb 12.
The parallelism of his case and her own is enforced by the Orientalising of Lizzie’s
widowhood. He is in a similar situation as Lizzie as the court decides whether he
“should have twenty millions of rupees paid to him and be placed upon a throne,
or whether he should be kept in prison all his life” (63). Lucy Morris, depicted as
morally superior to Lizzie, defends the cause of the Sawab when she complains
that “the prince is being used very ill – […] he is being deprived of his own property,
[…] he is being kept out of his rights, just because he is weak” (102). Although
Lizzie’s claim for the diamonds rests on lies, she, too, is deliberately kept
in ignorance of her rights (273) and thus remains at the mercy of men in power.
The emphasis on the legal status of the Eustace Diamonds points to another
context for the discussion of women as owners, topical in the 1870s, which is
detached from the diamonds as Oriental objects. The first ‘Married Women’s
Property Act’ had, even long before it was passed in 1870, stirred a discussion on
the subject. The underlying intention was to improve the standing of workingclass
women who had to hand over their wages to their husbands. The controversy,
however, also exposed the injustices women faced in the middle and upper
classes (Dolin 68-70). Before the act was passed, all property owned by a woman
automatically passed to her husband on marriage, and she lost all rights to income
and revenue from her property.
The insecurity of women’s possession of objects of great value which the texts
address is illustrated by the immediate danger through some Oriental design. In
The Eustace Diamonds the reference is more obliquely introduced in the disempowered
state of widows through sati and the parallels to the Sawab of Mygawb’s case.
Lizzie is in the first instance threatened because of her unprotected and, according
to Frank, unnatural state as a widow. In the comparison with the Indian prince,
her precarious position is likened to his as both of them depend on the intervention
of men in power like Lord Fawn and Frank Greystock, both involved in the
case. Frank Greystock pleads in the Sawab’s favour and also supports Lizzie’s
claim of the diamonds while Lord Fawn opposes both.
Women appear as unable to hold possession of the diamonds but are at the
same time bound up in the imagery of metaphors and similes conferring the corrupting
or desirable qualities of diamonds on the female protagonists. In the plots,
women and diamonds also occupy a usually mutually exclusive position as reward
for successful detection in the reestablishment of order at the end of the stories. I
12 The name alludes to the long-running court case of the insolvent Maharajah of Mysore (Trollope
773 note 6). Krishnarajah Wodeyar ascended the throne after the defeat of Tipu, 1799. He
was removed in 1831 because he had incurred heavy debt and the British government took over
the administration of the state. In 1867 it was decided that Mysore should again be ruled by an
Indian prince, and in 1881 Krishnarajah’s successor ascended the throne (Anon., “Mysore”).
The novel’s action is set in 1865-66 (Sutherland 24) when the question of native rule was debated
before the decree took effect one year later.