Wales has been subordinated to England since becoming England’s first colony in the sixteenth century, and its long tenure as a colony has resulted in a paradoxical existence: Wales is simultaneously familiar to England, because of its contiguity and the various ways it has been assimilated, and foreign, because of its language and the various ways it has resisted assimilation. This dissertation centers its analysis on Wales, acknowledging Wales’ liminality and examining the affordances of that liminality across several nineteenth-century Anglophone British novels: Mary Hays’ The Victim of Prejudice (1799), the anonymously published The Woman of Colour, A Tale (1808), John Thelwall’s The Daughter of Adoption; A Tale of Modern Times (1801), Maria Edgeworth’s Helen (1834), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853), Anthony Trollope’s Cousin Henry (1879), and R.T. Casson’s Mary Armitage, The Miner’s Daughter: A Story of Collier Life (1885). This is the first longitudinal study of Wales in the nineteenth-century Anglophone British novel. By focusing on the long nineteenth century, this dissertation develops a narrative about Wales that engages with literary periods without prioritizing them, thereby allowing Wales to maintain primacy. By centering Wales, I take a geocritical approach and I participate in the recent devolutionary trajectory of British literature studies, in which literary critics work to acknowledge the ways Ireland, Scotland, and Wales participate and are represented in the literature and literary marketplace of Britain. In presenting my findings, I do not attempt to pin down Wales’ identity. Rather, I examine the affordances of Wales’ liminality, analyzing how it manifests in or influences the novels and, thereby, illuminating the plurality of Wales’ relationships to England, Britain, and the British Empire. The unifying concept of Wales enables a dialogue around a unique combination of texts, bringing marginalized texts by well-known authors under fresh scrutiny, creating unique critical avenues for more recently recovered texts, and promoting archival research by sharing texts that I have recovered from the periodicals archive.