The Revealer of Secrets is the last-published title in the long list of novels attributed to the anonymous author of The Woman of Colour (1809). It is the story of a house, narrated by the house. 
​   Whoever wrote this novel, I'm going to declare that it was not the author of the first novels in the chain, such as The Duke of Clarence (1795) or Rebecca (1799). The difference in detail and narrative complexity between the early novels and the later novels is striking. It’s hard to imagine any writer maturing and improving her style to such a degree over the years. It’s like when one of your students hands in some homework that they clearly didn’t write themselves—you just know.
   On the other hand, I initially thought the style of this novel didn't match the later novels such as The Splendour of Adversity (1814) either, because I was well into the first chapter and there was no mention of God, Heaven, or salvation. The story begins with an unrelated prologue consisting of two old men standing in front of the house and debating how old it might be. However, once we get into the actual narrative, the moralizing strain arises...

   Boy, what a slog. Frankly, I skimmed through most of this book. I had assumed that The Duke of Clarence was an historical novel but as it turns out, it’s a gothic novel set in England and France in the 15th century. Gothic novels aren’t my thing. I just can’t get excited about abducted and immured heroines, evil priests, secret passages, dastardly noblemen, and garrulous servants. So I confess—I didn’t catch every little detail explaining how and why our nobly-born hero Edgar De Montford ended up being mislaid and becoming a foundling.
    But the never-ending backstories with their thwarted love affairs and general perfidy--I mean, if you were a noblewoman unjustly immured in a tower for sixteen years and out of nowhere, two different people find you—coincidentally on the same night—and they asked you, Oh my god, what happened? Who put you here? would you give them a brief precis as you were running through the door to freedom, and maybe get into the details later after you've had a hot bath and a good meal? Or would you spend hours telling them the whole story from the beginning, recalling entire conversations and your every gesture with it? I’d be high-tailing it out of there. 
     As mediocre as this book is, I will say in justice to this authoress, and in contrast with Eliza Kirkham Mathews' youthful effort The Phantom, the backstories at least all tie together and relate to the central mystery of the story.

​    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 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....