Rebecca is one of 22 novels that may—or may not—have been written by the author of the 1809 novel The Woman of Colour, a book which has attracted a lot of academic interest in recent years. I’ve been entertaining myself by reading these novels to see if I can find similarities to The Woman of Colour.
   Rebecca, published in 1799, is one of the earliest in this chain of novels which stretches from 1795, with the historical novel The Duke of Clarence, to 1817 and The Revealer of Secrets. One similarity worth noting is that the father of Olivia Fairfield in The Woman of Colour, and the father of Rebecca Elton in this novel, both tell their daughters who they should marry in their last will and testament.
    I have a lot to say about Rebecca, even though it is a minor, third-rate novel. It earned only a brief literary snort from the London Review, which quoted a bit of dialogue: “Ah, Rebecca! How shall I part with you?” to which the reviewer answered: “Without a sigh!”
   Yes, the dialogue is often clichéd (and exceedingly florid to our modern tastes) and the narration is stilted. In that respect, we can contrast this authoress with Jane Austen. We can compare the themes and tropes of other novels of this era, and at some point, I’ll come back to it to discuss more similarities to The Woman of Colour, but not quite yet...

​    Substance and Shadow opens with a genteel lady watching a storm blow in to the shore at Brighton, then a fashionable watering place patronized by the Prince of Wales. Mrs. Elwyn is amused by the rhapsodies of another young lady gamboling along on the beach, exclaiming over the tremendous crashing of the waves. We have here the same dichotomy Jane Austen used in Sense and Sensibility. Clara Elwyn “knew that romance and enthusiasm were the leading features of the day, and that those feelings were nurtured and indulged, at the hazard of running counter to all the forms and usages of society, and the good old way in which she had been taught to walk.”
    But Mrs. Elwyn is concerned because she knows that a fisherman and his wife had gone out to sea that morning, and have not returned. The following morning brings the sad news that they are drowned, and Mrs. Elwyn benevolently visits the humble cottage where their twin infant daughters are being cared for by a neighbor woman. The babies will now become the responsibility of the parish and their prospects are bleak. Suddenly, the excitable young lady, also drawn to the news of the catastrophe, swoops in and carries off one of the babies. Mrs. Elwyn decides to give a home to the other. It will give her someone to care for, since she is childless and her husband is polite but remote and often absent...

   I was doing some research into how the reception of Mansfield Park has changed since it was first published. It is now generally regarded as her least popular novel, and some say, her least successful novel artistically. It's a favourite of mine, obviously, since I wrote an Austenesque trilogy based on it. In my own books, I had to come to terms with the slave trade and the fact that Sir Thomas owns a plantation (called an "estate" in the book) in Antigua. The issue of slavery was not an issue for a critic writing 100 years ago, even though they were not as far removed from the time of slavery.
​   I also had to deal with the widespread perception of the heroine Fanny Price as a prim little prig, or a timid little mouse. The anonymous author of this 1927 review, reproduced below, doesn't like Fanny, Edmund, or the book, but his opinions and the way he phrased them amused me. I think other Janeites would like this too, even Mansfield Park fans. But if you haven't read Mansfield Park, be advised, this review contains spoilers.

​MANSFIELD PARK—JANE AUSTEN’S WORST NOVEL
  Sheffield Daily Telegraph, Jan. 20, 1927
    When new books fail to charm—and there comes a time when they do, and when all one’s favourite modern authors seem to be writing tiresome rubbish—there is no cure so good for the soul as to re-read old ones. We suspect that advancing age has much to do with this failure to find a new book to our taste.
   To anyone suffering from this sad fate, whatever his age and literary preferences, we unhesitatingly recommend a course of Disraeli novels or those of Jane Austen.
    To write of Jane Austen in general is like trying to find something new to say about the weather… Yet there remains, we think, something to be said of Mansfield Park. Perhaps it was because we read it last of all, of perhaps because it really is not so good as the others, that we must admit to finding it a very mediocre performance. Compared with the charming simplicity of Catherine Morland, the robust sense of Elinor Dashwood, the quiet intelligence of Anne Eliot or the satirical wit of Emma Woodhouse, Fanny Price is a dull and extraordinarily priggish heroine. As for Edmund Bertram, he is a prince of prigs indeed.

   I am slowly working my way through a dozen or so novels, all belonging to a tangled attribution chain, with the intent of figuring out whether Mrs. E.G. Bayfield or Mrs. E.M. Foster is the most likely author of The Woman of Colour, a Regency-era book which has drawn much recent scholarly interest. Next up: The Corinna of England, and a Heroine in the Shade (1809), published by Benjamin Crosby and Co. The fact that the author of Corinna of England is credited as being the author of The Woman of Colour right there on the title page to the right is not enough to prove the attribution, because the waters have been considerably muddied along the way.
    At any rate, let’s turn to the novel. No, wait, we can’t do that yet, until we first explain that Corinna of England is a parody of a tremendously successful French novel, Corinne, or, Italy (1807), by the authoress and public intellectual Madame de Stael. 
​    Corinne caused a sensation at the time but also caused a backlash in England because of its feminist heroine. Corinne is a free-spirited poet and artist who entertained men at her home, did not shy away from fame, and openly courted the man she wanted to marry. The plot of de Stael’s novel is of secondary importance, although I will note two things which struck me; one, that de Stael uses a lot of narrative philosophical interludes which put me in mind of George Elliot, and secondly, after introducing her hero, she has him heroically rescue some people from a burning building. In other words, she gives him some hero bona fides, because otherwise he’s just some rich, well-born Englishman moping around Europe. As I have learned, a lot of leading men in these old novels are not heroes in the sense of being heroic, and some in my opinion are quite unheroic.
    So that's Corinne. Now, let's move on to the 1809 parody....