Lela Harris

Preparatory collages for Miss Lambe, 2025

Lela Harris is an artist best known for her portraits often depicting those who have been overlooked or marginalised by history. These collages form a body of preparatory work for Harris’s new portrait of Miss Lambe, a character from Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon.

Miss Lambe is unique in Austen’s novels as a character of African heritage. In Sanditon, Miss Lambe attracts the attention of other characters because she is a wealthy young heiress, who had a ‘maid of her own’ and ‘was always of the first consequence in every plan’. Her great fortune tempts unscrupulous characters to imagine acquiring her wealth through marriage.

Harris’s collages centre around an imagined visit to Harewood by Miss Lambe in 1817. Using cut-outs from catalogues, postcards and archival photographs of

Black Victorians and twentieth-century workers, Harris pieces together a vision of what this experience might have been like for a mixed-race woman, in a playful, empathetic way. Harris uses collage to build a picture of Austen’s character beyond the incomplete manuscript, rooted instead within the context of Harewood and its complex histories and collections. In doing so, Harris bridges the gap between fact, fiction and historical imagination.

Harris’s portrait of Miss Lambe will be unveiled in Summer 2025.