For some months now, I've been churning my way through 21 novels, novels which may or may not have been written by the same anonymous author who wrote The Woman of Colour (1808) To recap, The Woman of Colour has attracted a lot of attention in academic circles because the protagonist is a mixed-race Jamaican heiress, instead of the usual blue-eyed, auburn-haired heroine of this era. My review of the novel is here. I thought that discovering the author of this significant anonymous work might be a very fun quest.
    Most of the academic enquiry into The Woman of Colour does not center around the quality of the writing, but around the historical and political implications of a novel from 1808 featuring a mixed-race heroine. Only one group of scholars, so far as I am aware, have attempted to seek out the author by analyzing the text and comparing it with other texts. The results were amusing, because the "stylometric" software declared that Jane Austen was a likely candidate! And no, absolutely not. If the program can't tell the difference between Austen's sublime, sarcastic prose and the--let's be honest here--absolutely average prose stylings in The Woman of Colour, then the software is useless. 
       There are two, or should I say three, main candidates for authorship of The WOC. I had hoped that by reading the novels, I would find the distinctive fingerprint of the author. While it's been interesting, it has not been definitive. I have concluded that many of the novels were written by the same person, especially the later novels, but the texts themselves did not provide evidence as to the identity of the author...​

Textual clues
    I have found many similarities in language and plot tropes between The WOC and the other novels in the chain--but, I must report, that one could find the same similarities between just about any novel written in this period. We may have an unusual heroine in The WOC--but the language, the religious sentiments, and the mechanics, so to speak, of these novels, have no unique fingerprint. For example, I wondered if the way the virtuous characters in the novels refer to God as the "Supreme Being," or the "Divine Disposer of Events" might be distinctive. Austen, if she refers to God at all, refers obliquely to Providence. But it turns out this is not distinctive enough. Dozens of novelists employed the term "Divine Disposer of Events." (I checked this out by doing text searches on the invaluable Corvey Collection of digitized novels.)
    How clichéd is the language? You might know about the time Jane Austen told her niece Fanny, who was writing a novel, to avoid the phrase "the vortex of dissipation." She wrote: "I cannot bear the expression, it is such thorough Novel Slang--and so old, that I dare say Adam met with it in the first novel he opened." Well, several of the novels use the actual phrase, "vortex of dissipation." Or "vortex of folly" or "vortex of unmeaning pleasure," and so on. So do dozens or hundreds of other novels.

Recycled Plots   
  The plot of The WOC uses the familiar novelist's standby of deceit and misunderstanding. A scheming villainess perpetrates a fraud upon the extraordinarily passive hero. When our heroine retreats to a solitary cottage in Wales, several people she knows just happen to be related to each other and just happen to live in the same neighbourhood. In other words, there would be no distinguishing the basic mechanics of this novel from the plots of hundreds of other novels. 
     Let me give an example. In another novel in the attribution chain, A Winter in Bath (reviewed here), the heroine is about to receive a marriage proposal from a sardonic but intelligent young nobleman she's met in Bath. He makes a formal appointment to come and speak to her. But he doesn't show up. Much later, she learns that he was in love with a sweet girl from an undistinguished family. His mother told him that the girl, who lived in a remote part of Scotland, was dead. He believed her, and he was nursing a broken heart but thought that our heroine Adriana would make a good wife. But then he discovers the girl he loves is not dead after all! So he rushes off to be reunited with her. It's okay, by the way, our heroine marries a man she loves anyway.
   It's easy to suppose that the author who wrote A Winter in Bath also wrote The Woman of Colour, in which Augustus marries Olivia, and he likes and respects her, but doesn't explain to her that he is pining for his wife, who he thinks is dead. After they've been married for a while, guess who pops up. So, very similar plot twists. In fact the author of the later novels used bigamy, intentional or not, very frequently in her plots.
​   That ties the novels together, but it does not identity a writer. Unless I can find a female writer whose husband committed bigamy, maybe.​

The Usual Suspects
   I have mentioned the main candidates for authorship in previous posts: Mrs. E.M. Foster, who identified herself by the initials "E.M.F." in two of the early books in the attribution list, and Mrs. E.G. Bayfield. I have uncovered the identity and life-story of Mrs. Bayfield, and it is an interesting one, but it is not part of The WOC story, so I won't get into it here. In earlier posts, I have credited Mrs. Bayfield with the authorship because her name appears in library catalogues and I was working with the hypothesis that she wrote the later novels in the chain. But now I understand that Mrs. Bayfield is credited with the novels because of a cataloguing error. You see, she wrote a (now lost) novel which her publisher titled A Winter at Bath in 1807, the same year that our anonymous author published a novel titled A Winter in Bath. Someone confused these two titles, and that's how Mrs. Bayfield came to be a potential author for The WOC. I'm not going to go back and change all my posts which mention Mrs. Bayfield, but I will post some updates. 
    Mrs. E.M. Foster remains a mystery. Her name could well be a pseudonym. The chance of tracking down her identity through genealogical records seems very slim. But one thing we can say is that if she wrote the early novels, I don't think she could be the author of the later novels, including The WOC. As average as the later novels are, the early novels were worse. Part of that, I suppose, is a matter of changing tastes. Today, we don't want heroes who fall on one knee and rave like lunatics, we don't want heroines who are "pictures of perfection," and many people would not care for books that advise us to resign ourselves to the fates meted out by Divine Disposer of Events. E.M.F.'s narrations are wooden, her language is trite, and her dialogue veers between stilted and hyperbolic. And the amazing coincidences can get comical.
     A final candidate for the authorship of The WOC is an actual mixed-race heiress named Ann Wright Maitland. Her life story bears some resemblance to Olivia Fairfield. I haven't seen any other evidence to back up the conjecture, though. I'll expand on my thoughts on that sometime in the future.
      I am going to take up a new project, which is reading novels from this era which name-drop Mary Wollstonecraft.

      So do I have an opinion about who wrote The Woman of Colour? Yes, I do. But I'll get back to that later... For anyone else wanting to study the authorial attribution chain, I've posted a handy table showing which novel was "by the author of" which other novel.

​Previous: WOC attributions

     I'm sharing this information with anyone who might be researching The Woman of Colour and the attribution chain of 21 anonymous novels from five different publishers. This is one tangled attribution chain, and it's been difficult to visualize it. I hope this helps.
​     The first table gives the titles by genre, and by whether they are epistolary or narrative. There are three novels I have not read because they are not available digitally, so I can't confirm their genre. By genre, I am distinguishing between books which are straightforward marriage-plot novels, and those that, like The Woman of Colour, don't have a conventional happy ending. Some use the "good girl/bad girl" approach, with the heroine finding happiness and her heedless friend running into disaster.
    The "by the Author of" column shows the books published earlier which are referenced on the title page of each book. The second column shows the novels which later referenced the title on their own title pages.
      The second graphic shows more clearly the fact that Light and Shade (1803) is the linchpin on the attribution chain. It is the only novel that has the older titles on its "by the author page." Then it's like a new chain starts, only referencing the titles published in 1803 and after.
    There are many mysteries. Why no attributions on the title page of The Aunt and the Niece? And why did the publisher, Crosby, merely say that A Winter in Bath was from the author of "two popular novels" instead of being specific? And if one woman wrote all the Crosby novels in the latter part of the table, why didn't Crosby publish A Woman of Colour? Why did it go to a different publisher? Crosby acknowledged the existence of the novel in later attributions.
   For those not aware, the Crosby publishing house was more prestigious than the Minerva publishing house.

     I've read and reviewed most of the novels in this chain. Sorry I was not able to link each title to my review, but if you click on the category "The Woman of Colour mystery" at upper right, you can see all the relevant posts. 

 Diagram of attributions
     This chart below does not show all of the attributions, because if I showed all the connections, it would be too busy to read. You can check each specific book for attributions in the chart above. This chart shows visually that the pre-1803 novels are connected to the later novels only through Light and Shade. No other novel published after 1803 refers back to the earlier novels. 
     The Woman of Colour connections are shown in red. Again, there are additional connections between the later novels but I have not drawn them all in. 

     It's thanks to the amazing Corvey Collection of novels that these novels were are available digitally. Another invaluable resource is the British Fiction Homepage, which provides a listing of novels published between 1800-1829, their distribution to libraries, and their reviews.

 ​Previous post:  Miss Letsom's complaints

       Yes, I've noticed that Writing Twitter and Writing Facebook are all about posts bemoaning the hardships that attend the life of a writer--oh, it' so hard to settle down and concentrate on writing, you spend hours in front of your keyboard with nothing to show for it, people are always saying insensitive or stupid things to you, then there is time you waste in research rabbit holes and nobody cares. When I read these complaints, I think to myself, well, nobody's holding a gun to your head, just don't be a writer.
     But none of these social media memes hold a candle to the epic monologue of a character in Substance and Shadow, which I previously reviewed. This is from the anonymous author of the string of novels attributed to the author of The Woman of Colour. I’m sharing this for the interest of professors and students looking into the lives of female authors in Regency times and the way they represented themselves in print.
    The fictional Miss Letsom is accused of putting real characters into her novels, something Jane Austen also faced....

It's always the quiet ones
     Miss Letsom is the impoverished orphan of a clergyman, working as the gentlewoman companion of a peevish East Indian nabob’s wife. Although she almost never speaks in company, here she is alone with the heroine, telling her backstory. She explains she needed to make money: “I fancied that I could manage to support myself decently and honourably by my pen.” She first attempts to write poetry about the “rudely-sublime scenery… drawn from nature and with the pencil of truth [which] must, I thought, come home to the tastes and the tastes and the feelings of all readers; but without interest [by which she means a patron], without a name, without a recommendation, I soon found that it was an Herculean labour to get a bookseller to read my poem, so I was forced to lock it up, with all its beauties, and set myself, with renewed courage and renewed perseverance, to the fabrication of a novel. Productions of this kind were, I knew, in general request; every body read them, therefore I should be sure of a purchaser. I have naturally a little turn for satire… Though I had resided in a remote part of England, yet the universal taste for the romantic beauties of nature (or the universal profession of such a taste) had drawn numerous individuals to our neighbourhood, who had afforded me an opportunity of studying the human character… I did not attempt at fine flights or bold inventions, my portraits were from nature alone" 

    Then she briefly segues into poking fun at melodramatic gothic novels and complains that her own novels met with a chilly reception because they were more realistic and drawn from nature. 

      One is reminded of an unflattering anecdote of Jane Austen: “she was no more regarded in society than a poker or fire screen or any other thin, upright piece of wood or iron that fills its corner in peace and quiet” but once she became known to be an author, she was “still a poker but a poker of whom everyone is afraid.” 
   But pardon the interruption. Please continue, Miss Letsom:

​     Those two previous sketches were intended by the author to be humorous but I've cut them down for length.  ​
    Second Austen interruption: Janeites will know that Jane Austen was also accused of copying real people. Her nephew wrote: ​“She did not copy individuals… A reviewer in the Quarterly speaks of an acquaintance who, ever since the publication of Pride and Prejudice, had been called by his friends Mr. Bennet, but the author did not know him… she herself, when questioned on the subject by a friend, expressed a dread of what she called such an ‘invasion of social proprieties.’ She said that she thought it quite fair to note peculiarities…. ‘besides,’ she added, ‘I am too  proud of my gentlemen to admit that they were only Mr. A. or Colonel B."

Our story resumes:   
     ​Finally, a local lady, Mrs. Bannister, approaches Miss Letsom and tells her she did well to disguise her critical portraits of her neighbours: “I do not blame you for concealing your name; perhaps it may be as well, all things considered; our acquaintances do not like to be lashed openly.”
     Miss Letsom protests that her neighbors were not her targets: “general folly and general turpitude call for the author’s lash, and this maybe done openly and with honest courage; but to aim an oblique shaft, in order to wound the breast of an acquaintance, is neither the part of the moralist or the Christian." 
     Mrs. Bannister urges her to put Lady Sawbridge into her novel so that everyone will recognize her: “her known infamy deserve[s] to be taken off… get every anecdote you can procure of her past life; insert them as a sort of episode to your main story… it will afford a nice contrast to the character of your heroine, who, like all heroines, I conclude, will be a piece of perfection… but, whatever you do, pray do not fail to make the likeness of Lady Sawbridge apparent; make it plain to every reader, I beseech you, and, lest it should not be sufficiently obvious, call her lady S------. Do this, my dear girl, and I will promise you to take fifty copies.”
    After Miss Letsom indignantly refuses, Mrs. Bannister explains that she was, in fact, testing her integrity and she has passed the test. She promises to be “your sincere friend, your zealous champion, and say what shall I do to serve you?”

    ​Miss Letsom laments that “in trying to be independent of the world, I have drawn down all its odium on my defenceless head. Heaven knows that I never protruded myself as an author, to gratify any feelings of ambition or vanity; how lamentably should I have suffered for my folly, had this been the case, for I have met with nothing but contumely and mortification!... How my name was first discovered as an authoress, is entirely unknown to me; but ever since have I been carped at, contemned, scorned, and hunted down, as if I were indeed a social pest!”
    She resolves to abandon authorship: “I will desert all in which I have delighted, I will burn my papers, I will throw aside my pen, I will divest myself of all relish for mental occupation.”
      ​    The anonymous author of this novel went on writing and publishing for another five years, if the attribution chain for The Woman of Colour is to be believed. 
    Other novelists who wrote biographically about their experiences trying to get published include favourite of this blog, Eliza Kirkham Mathews.

    Well, I am sure you want to know what became of Miss Letsom. ​After her employer dies and leaves her a legacy, she is able to take a quiet cottage to share with the heroine, where she is free to let her “lively and brilliant imagination… [shine] forth with redoubled lustre, like the sun after a transient cloud; if a sudden turn of thought struck her fancy, she might hazard it, without being deemed censorious, sarcastic, or impertinent.” After the heroine marries a baronet, Miss Letsom is her frequent guest.

Previous:  Three Judiths                                          Next: Hope that's clear--attribution charts for The Woman of Colour

    There are actually three Judiths in this story. As the Orlando Project for Women’s Writing in the British Isle explains: “The incredibly complex plot follows three generations of Judiths and takes place across England, Scotland, Wales, and Jamaica. The story opens with the exemplary clergyman James [Mordaunt] being freed to marry Judith, firstly by getting a small living and secondly by the death of her tyrannical [step-] father. The narrative backs up to tell the story of her mother, also Judith, who was an aristocrat who married for love and was disowned.”
    And there is much more crammed into two volumes, involving dastardly villainy, several backstories, and happy coincidences. One hero—the husband of the first Judith--is wrongly thought to be dead, not once, but twice. Rev. Mordaunt, husband of the second Judith, rescues a baby boy washed ashore from a shipwreck. The infant comes complete with initialed clothing and a miniature locket of a woman. Does the clergyman place a notice in the newspapers? No, of course not! He and Judith the second keep the child. Of course, as Judith foresees, this will inevitably give rise to a love affair between this boy and their own daughter Judith (the third), so they resolve to deceive the boy and let him think that he is actually their son, so he will think of Judith the third as his sister.

    The second Judith reasons thusly: “[I]n case the parents or any relatives should hereafter claim the child, [and how will they do that, since nobody knows the poor child is alive] they would be ill pleased to find his affections engaged to an obscure clergyman’s daughter.”
    “I yield to the justice of your remark,” said [her clergyman husband] Mordaunt,” and though I hate concealment, in this cause I will acquiesce.”
    Well, that’s a completely convincing plot point. Of course a clergyman would go along with deliberately lying to everybody about a helpless baby who probably has relatives that are devastated by his supposed death in a shipwreck and who would be overjoyed to find him.
    What a coincidence--the rescued infant turns out to be their own nephew (if I’ve got this tangled plot right), the legitimate heir to a Welsh and a Scottish title. Elizabeth Neiman, a scholar of the Minerva novels, points to a genre called the 'providential" novel, “a variation on the earlier sentimental novel.... shipwrecked infants, foundlings—the providential novel is built on the secret nobility of the hero or heroine. Yet this is an open secret; the hero’s exceptional good looks and virtuous mind unsubtly signal his real identity to readers as does his pervasive feeling of discomfort when living as a commoner.”
​    Out of the wreckage of the tragic lives of most everyone else in this novel, Judith the Third and James, now Lord Dunlair, are happily married.

 A prejudicial portrait
   There is an episode in this novel which makes for an interesting contrast to The Woman of Colour. A reminder that The Woman of Colour is of great interest to scholars because the protagonist is an intelligent, virtuous, mixed-race heiress from Jamaica. Judith features a mixed-race heir as well, but he is held up to contempt. 
​    Lieutenant Melross learns that his beloved Judith (Judith the first) married another man because she had been told he was dead. He takes his broken heart off to Jamaica. There he finds employment with a miserly old planter named Gordon. But we do not get plantation-scenes; Melross works in a counting-house. Mr. Gordon has a very young wife and a child. When the old coot dies, Lt. Melross meets the rest of the family who show up for the reading of the will, including one who is described first as “a little short black man, who appeared to have claimed both a black father and mother,” then he is described as a "mullato,” that is, someone of mixed race.
    This man and his wife pass the time before the will is read by sneering that the young widow must have cuckolded her ancient husband: “If ever a poor soul had horns, sure it was poor blind Mr. Gordon.”
    In other words, we are to understand right away that these people are insolent and vulgar. The black man turns out to be Mr. Gordon’s chief beneficiary. Except for five thousand pounds to the widow, the will directs that the entire estate go to “Mr. John Gordon… who I here avow to be my son, by my favorite negro wench Yanko." He gets "the whole of my property, together with all my plantations, or whatever money I possess…”
    By describing John Gordon as someone who appears to have had black parents, I think the narrator is insinuating that the "wench" Yanko is the one who cuckolded the late Mr. Gordon and presented him with a child fathered by someone else.
     The beneficiaries promptly tell the widow to pack up and get out. “D’ye hear that,” again interrupted the vixen [John Gordon’s wife], turning to Mrs. Gordon; “get your trumpery packed, for I sha’n’t lend my house to vagabond gentry.”
    “Scarcely could I conceal my indignation at this wretch’s injustice,” [Lt. Melross recounts, adding sarcastically] “but my reflections were interrupted by the kind executor, who allowed the widow to remain one month longer, in her present habitation.”

Historical accuracy
​     As Lyndon J. Dominique explains in his foreword to the scholarly edition of The Woman of Colour, the Jamaican colonial government put a limit on the amount that black or mixed-race people could inherit, setting a cap of 2,000 pounds. This explains why the heroine Olivia will only receive the lion's share of her inheritance if she marries her cousin Augustus--the money will be transferred to him. In Judith, John Gordon is clearly getting much more than 2,000 pounds. His inheritance includes a handsome home and multiple plantations. This suggests that the author of Judith was not aware of the law, or perhaps just didn’t care.  
    For that matter, the author shows a cavalier disregard for the provisions of Lord Hardwicke’s marriage act. People couldn’t just run off and get married, as several couples do in this novel, not without announcing the banns in church or getting a special license. (Or going to Gretna Green, of course). 
    Although scenes are set in Jamaica, there are no details about the enslaved population or plantation life. In fact, the word "slavery" is used by a white character to describe his own situation. Major Montgomery marries a simple country girl whom he abandons in Jamaica so he can bigamously marry a rich Jamaican widow. He complains the widow “was ugly in the extreme” with a “diabolical” temper… “I could not prevail on her to make to me any of her property during her life-time; it therefore became my task to please this woman; and for some years I lived the life of a slave with her. After ten years of “worse than Egyptian bondage,” the widow dies. Although Montgomery is not intended to be a sympathetic character, it jars a modern reader to see someone comparing themselves to a slave while living in Jamaica.
        The real puzzle though, is could a writer who talked of slavery in such a cavalier fashion, and portrayed the illegitimate offspring of a planter in such a disparaging way, turn around and write The Woman of Colour eight years later? Did something occur to enlighten her? Did she have an awakening of conscience? Of is this evidence of two different authors?

The unknown authoress Mrs. Foster 
   It seems quite believable that the authoress who wrote Judith also wrote Rebecca and Miriam, making a trilogy of novels featuring heroines with Old Testament names. She's also credited with Frederic & Caroline, or the Fitzmorris family. At the end of the second volume of Judith, the author is also credited with a novel called Mirvan. I suspect the compositor, who was working from a hand-written manuscript, must have misread the word "Miriam" for Mirvan. Just a fun little discovery. It appears that Rebecca, Judith, and Miriam were all printed at or around the same time, because they reference each other on the title pages and here, as we see, on the back pages. I think the lucky authoress went to the Minerva Press with a stack of manuscripts and he bought them all, including Emily of Lucerne.
    Judith received no reviews when it was first published. 

Previous post:  Fedaretta and Emily of Lucerne