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...​

     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. 

       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....

    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.