​     Well, this was a wild ride. I read it on one evening, saving time by skipping over the poetry composed by the two heroines. Some of the novels I've read recently had very little in the way of plot, but this book has an abundance of plot, especially in the second and third volumes.
     In the first volume, we meet a lot of characters, and I always struggle when an author throws a lot of characters at me and I’m supposed to remember their names and who they are. Speaking of, apart from the complicated set-up of Sense and Sensibility, Austen’s most 18th-century-sounding novel, is Austen good at introducing her characters in a natural and engaging way, or what?
   However, I’ll give Eliza Taylor full credit for not introducing irrelevant or extraneous characters, a common fault of novelists of this period.  At first I couldn’t understand why Elizabeth acquires at least five suitors, but every character has some role to play in the plot eventually; we do not have the typical galaxy of comic characters who are simply there to populate the heroine’s world and illustrate some prevailing vice or folly...

     The Dead Letter Office is perhaps the most intriguing title on the list of novels associated with the anonymous author of The Woman of Colour (1808),  A "dead letter office" suggests many exciting plot possibilities. (Should I explain for the kids that this is the department of a post office where undeliverable letters end up?)  The subtitle--A Tale for the English Farmer’s Fireside--also teaches us something about book publishing in Jane Austen’s era, but I’ll get back to that.
     I was not able to read it until I visited England recently and looked at a copy in the British Library. I discovered it is not a novel with a plot built around the dead letter department of a post office. It is a pastiche, a collection of individual letters with no connection to one another except that they all portray folly or greed or vanity. A young man who works at the post office in London visits his aunt, an “antiquated spinster” (who is also the narrator), and shares letters which have ended up in the dead letter office with her. They are intended (naturally) to teach a moral lesson. 
     So we have some miscellaneous writings--what was called, in those days, "fugitive pieces"--including a poem, which could have lain in the author’s desk for years, patched together to eke out a two-volume publication. This author had already produced six novels in seven years for the publisher Benjamin Crosby, but after this title, there was to be only one more, The Splendour of Adversity (1814). The Crosby publishing firm declared bankruptcy in 1814.
​    The "dead letters" account for about half of the content of this two-volume title. The letters are basically mini short stories, similar to the short fiction pieces you will find in periodicals of the era, such as The Lady's Magazine. I won’t give details of all the letters, but here’s a sampling...