(Margaret de Windt, who married Charles Brooke, Rajah of S...)
Margaret de Windt, who married Charles Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, in 1869, describes her adventurous and lonely life as Ranee of that wild and remote land.
Ranee of Sarawak, Margaret Brooke enjoyed a place among Europe’s most renowned Victorian writers, artists, politicians, and scientists.
Background
Margaret Brooke was born Margaret de Windt, on October 9, 1849, in Paris, France. She was the daughter of Joseph Clayton Jennyns de Windt and Elizabeth Sarah Willes de Windt.
Her mother descended from pro-revolutionary French aristocrats, and Brooke was raised on the ancestral estate in France.
Career
To understand Brooke’s writing, one must understand the history of Sarawak. Brooke’s travel memoirs were the central voice in a public debate over the small Brunei state, Sarawak. In 1842, Brunei’s sultan officially appointed Sir James Brooke to be rajah (or governor) of Sarawak, and Brooke was also considered the owner. He left the dominion to his nephew, Sir Charles Brooke (Lady Margaret Brooke’s husband), in 1868. The legal status of Sarawak was always in question with the British Government. The Brookes strove to transform Sarawak from a small family kingdom into an internationally recognized country, with Brooke as its king.
Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Brookes produced a number of travel books on Sarawak in order to persuade England to recognize their kingdom officially as a nation. The romanticized story of the Brookes in Sarawak, in which, as Morgan describes it, “the white rajah was the hero of that myth of isolated white men ruling over wild peoples in a tropical setting,” fascinated Victorian English readers. Like many of the popular adventure novels at the time, it portrayed the Englishman as the heroic, intrepid individual; women are non-existent in these narratives. Brooke’s travel books differ in that they tell the story of Sarawak from a woman’s perspective.
My Life in Sarawak was very well-received. Written four years before Sir Charles died, the tone is tame, but not dutiful. Brooke painted a frank portrait of her husband as a silent and humorless man, and her marriage as a bleak disappointment. Unlike the wholly affirmative celebration of British colonial life typical of most Victorian English travel books, Brooke’s memoir was ambivalent.
In her memoir, Brooke reports that she is sad to be writing her book in London, and not in Sarawak surrounded by loving family and friends. She has sought an identity as a Malay woman, but her husband has denied her this by banishing her from Sarawak.
Only half of Good Morning Good Night is a memoir of Sarawak; the rest describes Brooke’s “exile” in Europe. In this second travel narrative, Brooke is more outspoken in her criticisms. She writes in a different time: Sir Charles had been dead almost twenty years; her son had taken over as rajah; Brooke had lived in Paris, Italy, and London; and she had met European luminaries such as William Morris, Conrad, and Henry James. Europe had also just weathered the first world war, and one of Brooke’s sons had died.
Achievements
Margaret Brooke is best known for her two travel books, My Life in Sarawak (1913) and Good Morning and Good Night (1934), which made the odd circumstances of her life public knowledge throughout England (she also published a short story collection set in England called Impromptus in 1923). The two travel books depict what Brooke considered the most exciting part of her life, her years as queen in the southeast Asian state of Sarawak (now on the island Borneo, in Malaysia).
As ranee of Sarawak, her identity was a royal and public one which placed her among Europe’s elite. Fort Margherita was erected by Rajah Charles and named after his wife, the Ranee Margaret.
(Good Morning and Good Night is the personal story of Marg...)
1934
Views
Brooke had grown up in France, so she always felt an outsider in England, and she such felt freer to criticize the imperial system. She could not relate to the English women in Malaysia, who she depicts as petty, homesick, and obsessed with their status. Brooke is also different from the other Englishwomen in her attitude toward the native Malaysians. She does not see them as savages but as people very much like the English, in most respects except circumstances. Rather than trying to retain her Brutishness, like the other colonial Englishwomen, she wears Malay dress and befriends Malay women. She finds a place in the community of Malay women as a woman who does not identify with the English, and as a woman who, like the Malay women, is oppressed by patriarchy and colonialism. In the end, Brooke belongs nowhere. In her recounting of her time back in England, she roams from home to home, a perpetual exile.
Brooke questions the idea of racial superiority, one of the foundations of European imperialist ideology. She recognizes the diversity of people labeled by Europeans as “black” and wonders at the vanity of Europeans to assume their superiority. When an Englishwoman says she would not like to be considered “black,” Brooke dismisses the label is simplistic and inaccurate, adding that she would love to be considered a Malay woman; she loves the people so much, she wishes that when she dies, she could have the works Sarawak written across her heart in gold letters by a passing angel. Her willingness to view life in Sarawak honestly and compassionately makes for delightful reading.
Brooke clearly enjoyed the privileges accorded her rank as a woman of the Ranee, and did not fully challenge the imperial system. The reason for her friendliness with the Malay women had as much to do with her personal tastes as it did with her being above rank from the other Englishwomen, wives of mere administrators. She omitted the reason for her trips to Borneo: for Sir Charles Brooke to expand the borders of Sarawak by appropriating more Malay lands. Though she points out its flaws, Brooke ultimately supported the greatness of the Victorian imperial enterprise, and her books were its propaganda. In the second half of Good Morning, she took on her title as the ranee of Sarawak publicly and unquestioningly.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
“Brooke’s travel memoirs constitute a vivid record of both Victorian society and a woman’s view of her role in one of the most bizarre instances of nineteenth-century British imperialism.” - Susan Morgan
“Audiences read Brooke’s memoir in part for its insider iconoclasm, for its revelations of what life was really like with the heroic rajah” - Susan Morgan
"Brooke's approach is not to take the heroic pose of keeping a sense of humor amid the vicissitudes of life but rather to recognize that the vicissitudes are most often false alarms - and that is what is funny.” - Susan Morgan
“Excluded by her husband from shaping an identity in Sarawak, Brooke adopted in England the imperial status that she had found in Sarawak to have been so privately unfulfilling.” - Susan Morgan
Connections
Margaret married Sir Charles Brooke in 1869 when she was nineteen, and he was forty, one year after Sir Charles Brooke was made the rajah of Sarawak. He had already fathered a child by a Malay woman, but wanted to produce a “proper” heir. The Brookes were in Sarawak by the spring of 1870. During the next four years, Brooke gave birth to three surviving children and one stillborn baby. When the family took a ship back to England, all three children died on board. Brooke gave birth to her fifth child, Vyner, in 1874 while the family was still in England.
They returned to Sarawak in 1875, and she gave birth to another son in 1876. After another four years the Brookes returned again to England, where Brooke gave birth to a third son. In 1880, the Brookes left their three sons safely in England and returned to Sarawak. Confident that a male heir had been secured, Sir Charles sent his wife back to England with an allowance in 1882. Brooke had served her purpose, and her cold, loveless marriage was therefore over.
Rajahs and Rebels: The Ibans of Sarawak Under Brooke Rule, 1841-1941
Many tales have been told about the White Rajahs of Sarawak, members of the Brooke family of England who for a century ruled the sparsely settled state of Sarawak in northwest Borneo, now part of Malaysia. Special attention to the personality and policies of Charles Brooke, the Second White Rajah, whose fifty-year reign largely shaped Sarawak. Examines the political and social position of the Ibans, a major tribal group of the area.