´Sybilla considered beauty as all in all. And this child - her child and Angus´s, would be a deformity on the face of the earth, a shame to its parents, a dishonour to its race.´ First published in 1850, Olive traces its eponymous heroine´s progress from her ill-starred birth to maturity as a painter and wife. The crippled child of parents who are disgusted by her physical ´imperfection´, a curvature of the spine, Olive struggles to take her place in the world as artist and woman. Published three years after Jane Eyre, Olive´s swift fictional response to Charlotte Bronte´s novel raises questions of family, race and nation. This edition also includes ´The Half-Caste´, a story that confronts questions of miscegenation and racial prejudice in Victorian Britain.