Godmother-Governesses and Biracial Cinderellas: The Use of Fairy Tales in Dinah Mulock Craik’s <i>The Half-Caste</i>

Abstract In Dinah Mulock Craik’s short and largely unacknowledged novella, The Half-Caste (1851), the half-Indian heroine, Zillah La Poer, achieves what seems impossible for a young woman of color in mid-century imperial Britain, rising from an uneducated and ill-treated biracial ward to a rich heiress-turned-bride, all under the watchful guidance of the novella’s narrator and main character, governess Cassandra Pryor. Though Craik’s novella has resurfaced in recent years with the help of a Broadview edition in 2016, the scholarly work and historical material in the introduction and appendixes do not highlight the fairy-tale inspirations and obvious Cinderella motifs in Craik’s text. Craik’s novella is, at its core, a Cinderella story, as Cassandra becomes a nonmagical fairy godmother tasked with transforming Zillah into a respected British citizen. As such, this article seeks to bring attention to Craik’s little-known novella by situating it in a larger tradition of Victorian Cinderella stories, highlighting the way it creates an idealized image of civilized harmony between non-white colonized people and white British citizens via governess-led education.