Examines the connections between gender and colonial relations in texts by British writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and Caribbean writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Mary Wollstonecraft, Anne Hart Gilbert, Elizabeth Hart Thwaites, Jane Austen, Jean Rhys, and Jamaica Kincaid. It argues that they were bound by their participation in a discourse about East Caribbean and British women and African-Caribbean slaves and in their desire to extend and amplify to fit different situations at the metropolitan center and its periphery in order to see and say things they otherwise would not be able to.