Here’s another novel which uses the same forced-marriage premise as The Woman of Colour, but to less dramatic effect. Our hero, John Scarsdale, is estranged from his father who is living openly with his mistress while the family baronetcy goes to rack and ruin. Scarsdale travels about the continent and befriends a retired merchant, Mr. Aubrey, who has a lovely daughter. The constraints of the plot mean that Aubrey has no one else in the world to turn too when he falls ill but his youthful new friend. When Mr. Aubrey dies, Scarsdale “promised to supply his place in the guardianship of the young lady… but judge... my astonishment, when on opening his will I found he had bequeathed me the sum of five thousand pounds, and left his daughter the bulk of his fortune, on condition of her marrying her guardian when she was of age, “provided his inclinations were so  conformable.” It turns out his inclinations are conformable. Though he is in his late twenties and Emily is not yet 18, she is everything he would like in a bride...

     Last week, I started reviewing the 1811 novel The Decision, comparing and contrasting it with The Woman of Colour (1808). ​Both feature a father who leaves a will dictating who his daughter should marry, with financial consequences if she doesn't. But, just as in The Woman of Colour, the intended bridegroom is already married! Augustus in The WoC doesn't know his first wife is alive. The slimy Horatio in The Decision had parked his wife in a cottage in Wales, as one does, but she showed up in time to stop the ceremony, thanks to the hero, Valcourt Beverly.
    Isabella is freed from her vow to her father! But, Valcourt thinks she loves her childhood friend Captain Granville, so the resolution of their love story takes a little longer. That seems like a flimsy misunderstanding to keep people apart but it's the same one used by Jane Austen in Persuasion. Due to constraints on female behaviour, the heroine cannot show her preference for the hero. And anyway, she thinks he just likes her as a friend.
​     Enter, stage right, a very wealthy, eccentric, and childless old man named Mr. Franklin who has returned from the East Indies with a handsome fortune and no-one to give it to. He's fairly embittered with life. His own love life went wrong and he is a bit of a misanthrope. The young people listen politely “to his severe remarks… for he could lash with severity the follies of the age, and predict the general ruin which would ensue from the indecorous conduct of the highest circles.” Another chance to mention that novels which "lash the follies of the age" were not necessarily radical in their tone. In fact, it was more often a conservative outlook at play there. Mr. Franklin is saying that the upper ranks of society don't live up to their responsibilities in life. The nobility and the royal princes all having affairs, that sort of thing...

     ​I first came across this novel when I was looking for any and all novels that mention gypsies, to compare them with the gypsy scene in Emma. This novel has a fairly pointless let-me-read-your-palm gypsy scene in Volume II. I have just re-read it because the author uses the same forced-marriage premise as The Woman of Colour; a man telling his daughter who to marry in his last will and testament. In fact, I am struck by how many plot points these two novels have in common. If you’ve read The Woman of Colour, follow along with me and see for yourself.
   The Decision begins as an epistolary novel then drifts into third person narration. It opens with the confessions of Charles Arundel, writing to his old friend Mr. Beverly. We learn that when he was a young man, he married a poor girl (like Augustus in The Woman of Colour) and kept the marriage a secret so his rich uncle wouldn’t cut off his inheritance (again, like Augustus, except he was hiding things from his dad). But his uncle found out and he drafted a new will, leaving his fortune to a cousin in the West Indies. Arundel visits his uncle on his death bed, finds the will, destroys it, and then slips his uncle some hemlock. I suppose that is the ‘decision’ of the title, though some more momentous decisions come at the end. This is all prologue to the story of our heroine Isabella, Arundel's daughter.

   I am sharing a research aid for students of The Woman of Colour which itemizes the times when the heroine Olivia Fairfield references her Christian faith. This chart was created by ChatGPT. I asked for this research aid because it appears to me that the Christian message is central to this novel but it has been largely ignored in modern critical commentary, with a few notable exceptions, such as in the work of Victoria Barnett-Woods, Octavia Cox, and Hyewon Ryu. It seems to me that you can't describe this novel accurately, let alone analyze it, without taking into account its strong Christian message.
    You'll notice this author is far more explicit in her Christian faith than, for example, Jane Austen. This particular genre is known as a "moral-domestic" novel, a term popularized by scholar Anthony Mandal. Hilary Haven (Didactic Novels and British Women's Writing, 1790-1820), describes moral domestic novels as "religiously-informed, heroine-centred narratives." That description certainly fits here. Other authors of moral domestic novels included Barbara Hofland, Hannah More and Ann Raikes Harding.
​     For more posts about The Woman of Colour and my research into the anonymous author, click the category "Woman of Colour mystery" to the right.

Method. This working concordance records substantive references in Olivia Fairfield’s correspondence to God, Providence, Christian belief and duty, prayer, worship, Scripture, divine government, resignation, and the afterlife. Page numbers refer to Lyndon J. Dominique’s Broadview edition (2008). The list is intended as a reproducible working aid rather than a claim that every possible biblical echo or conventional religious expression has been counted.

​Summary of the Distribution: The concordance contains over forty substantive passages, depending on whether adjacent statements are combined. The important feature is their distribution: Olivia’s religious language appears from her first letter to her last and occurs during anticipation, danger, courtship, marriage, domestic happiness, catastrophe, forgiveness, and final departure. It is therefore not merely a language generated by the crisis in the latter part of the novel.

Particularly significant comparison. Before the central calamity, Olivia speaks of a “superintending Providence” and asks how she could support herself without her “firm faith in God” (82–83). Later she says that human beings should not question the “dispensations of an all-wise and all-just God” and that afflictions prepare them for “eternal bliss” (161). The editor’s closing appeal to “our most holy faith” and consciousness of a “divine Disposer of Events” is therefore conceptually continuous with Olivia’s repeatedly stated theology.
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Editorial note. This is a working research concordance. Before publication, quotations should be checked directly against the edition used for the article, particularly where OCR or typographical modernization may affect punctuation.

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