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. Formulaic expressions and religious remarks made solely by other characters are generally omitted; closely related references occurring within one passage are grouped as a single entry. 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.

Previous post:  Who wrote The Woman of Colour? I think I know

    ​The scholarly reprint of The Woman of Colour came out eighteen years ago. It tells the story of a mixed-race heiress, Olivia Fairfield, who comes to England in obedience to her father's last will and testament, to marry her cousin Augustus, who is white. See here for a synopsis and a review of this novel that I wrote a few years ago.
      The question of who might have authored The Woman of Colour has added a strong fillip of interest to the reception of the text ever since. Lyndon J. Dominique, editor of the 2008 edition, said in his introduction that "weighing the facts that this text was probably written by a woman but not a British one--rather, one who had significant ties to the colonies as well as in-depth knowledge of British society--it seems most plausible to propose that a woman of color wrote The Woman of Colour". That was an exciting possibility. A novel, written in 1808, by a racially aware mixed-race woman. As my grandmother would say, rarer than hen's teeth. When studying the voices of people of colour in this era, the pickings are slim. The autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, a freed slave, was a big bestseller in its time (1789). There is the History of Mary Prince (1833), an enslaved woman who made it to freedom in England and dictated her life story to English abolitionists. Dominique arranged to digitize a rare surviving copy of The Woman of Colour held in the British Library and bring it widespread academic and popular attention. But, is there any evidence for who wrote it? 

​     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...