Emilie Maresse-Paul
Emilie Maresse-Paul (1838–1900) was a Trinidadian intellectual and writer of the 19th century. One of the only examples of nineteenth-century women intellectuals in the British West Indies, she wrote about secular education and was staunchly anti-clerical. Believing in reason, she championed equality before the law and discounted prejudices against people because of their skin color, gender or social standing. Early life Emilie Maresse was born in 1838 in Trinidad. She was the daughter of Mrs. Prosper Maresse and a descendant of Narcisse St. Tour, a free-colored man, who had immigrated to Trinidad from Martinique in 1782. Educated at home by tutors, she studied European literature and was fluent in both English and French. Endorsing reason, she followed the values of the French Enlightenment and had a marked hostility toward authoritarian rule and organized religion. At the age of eighteen, Maresse married Alexander Smith, and in a unique move for her time, retained her maiden name. She made sure also that her two children kept her name using Maresse-Smith as their surname. The couple's son Edgar Maresse-Smith would become a leading figure in Trinidad's politics at the turn of the twentieth century. Smith died young in the early 1860s, shortly after