Jane Cumming's allegation that her teachers had been sexually intimate led to a racially inflected early nineteenth-century defamation of character lawsuit, Miss Marianne Woods and Miss Jane Pirie Against Dame Helen Cumming Gordon. Jane was born in Patna, India, in 1795 or 1796; by 1803 she was being brought up in Scotland. Her father was Scots, her mother Indian, and she was of color. From the case documents, we know Jane was a well-developed adolescent, bigger than the average Scottish girl her age— and if she wasn't more knowledgeable about sexual matters than the gentry girls who were her classmates, she was certainly less coy about describing them to men in a public space. The absence of any remark in the case documents about her speech suggests that the English she spoke was free of any Indian accent. She was, according to various accounts, a bully, a ringleader, a mediocre student, something of a drama queen. At times she was malicious or manipulative. She brooded over slights and plotted revenge. Despair gave her courage. She was also reflective, observant, grateful, and affectionate. She developed a crush on one of her teachers and made sexual overtures to a classmate. She was compared both to a famous victimizer (Iago) and to a victim (a sexually abused infant).

These details suggest a complicated person, and they whetted my curiosity to know more about her. I ended up writing this biography because I couldn't find out what happened to her after she stepped down from the witness stand in March 1811. Drawing on many sources, some never tapped before, Scandal and Survival recovers, reconstructs, and contextualizes Jane Cumming's life.

Chapter 1, which begins before she was born, sets the stage. It introduces the Cumming family, which traced its roots back to the twelfth century, and family members including Jane's ambitious but choleric grandfather, her emotional and impulsive grandmother, the uncle who made a fortune in East India Company service, and a father who stopped his ears whenever the subject of prudence was broached. Jane's great-uncle Henry Mackenzie, better known as The Man of Feeling (after his 1771 novel by that name), makes a cameo appearance. The chapter ends with her arrival in Scotland, accompanied by a personal servant and a younger brother.