CMP #214: Mrs. Foster has thoughts: review of Light and Shade, 1803 
​  Of the several thousand novels published during the long eighteenth century, The Woman of Colour has a special place in the hearts of the academy because the protagonist is a woman of colour. I reviewed the novel here. Some academics speculate that the author of The Woman of Colour might actually be a woman of colour. I will weigh up the case for that, but Mrs. E.M. Foster and Mrs. E.G. Bayfield are top candidates for the answer to the question: “who wrote The Woman of Colour”? 
   Therefore, I am following the tangled trail of title page attributions and—here’s a novel thought—actually reading the books authored by Foster and Bayfield to look for similarities with The Woman of Colour in language, plot, tropes, and themes...

​​     Many of Jane Austen’s devoted readers feel surprise and consternation over the passages in Persuasion about "troublesome, hopeless" Dick, the deceased son of the Musgrove family, along with the mocking depiction of his sorrowful mother. Austen doesn’t pull her punches in describing Dick as “stupid and unmanageable" and as someone who "had been very little cared for at any time by his family, though quite as much as he deserved.” His death far from home was “scarcely at all regretted.”
​   Some scholars have surmised that, had Austen not been in the throes of her final illness, she would have revised her callous descriptions or excised them altogether. Others have speculated about why Austen inserted these harsh passages in a novel famous for its gentle heroine and its wistful tone.
   Could it be that these strongly-worded passages hint at something Austen felt strongly about? Her seemingly out-of-place attack on the Musgroves is intended to catch the reader’s attention, to provoke them to pause and probe beyond the liminal space of the Musgrove's drawing room and to confront the costs of empire which supports their way of life. Indeed, we were mistaken in taking these passages at face value.
​    Dick Musgrove may well have been a satiric, inverted portrait of a real-life Richard who served in the Navy—Richard Parker, infamous in Austen’s time but forgotten today.

       So where are you in your journey from Austen fan to Austen superfan? Have you worked out the Austen family tree? Do you smile politely when someone quotes Austen's "little bit of ivory" at you, because you've already heard or read it a hundred times? Have you read any or all of the novels mentioned in Northanger Abbey? Did you know that "Lover's Vows," the play performed by the young people in Mansfield Park, was a real play?
      In my opinion, Jane Austen's Bookshelf by Rebecca Romney is geared toward people who are not far along in their Austen journey, but are ready and eager to learn more. On the other hand, well-informed Janeites might find that it covers familiar territory, while others might be bemused by the proposition that Maria Edgeworth and Frances Burney are forgotten writers whose connection to Austen was waiting to be rediscovered.
    I don't mean that as a criticism of a well-written and deeply researched book, which this is. For someone wanting to learn more about Austen and her literary world, Jane Austen's Bookshelf is packed with revelations for the reader (I'll get back to that later) and a valuable guidebook to the literature of her time.   

​     What makes a hero? You’ll find lots of modern readers putting down Austen heroes—Edmund Bertram of Mansfield Park tops the list of disliked heroes, followed by Edward Ferrars of Sense and Sensibility. Edmund is clueless and Edward is feckless. Mr. Knightley of Emma and Henry Tilney of Northanger Abbey are mansplainers. Persuasion’s Captain Wentworth flirts with the Musgrove girls in front of Anne Elliot, and don’t tell me he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Mr. Darcy of Pride and Prejudice usually escapes unscathed, unless you fault him for being a wealthy landowner in a nation where so many were desperately poor.
     Well, at this blog we look at Jane Austen’s novels in context, not only in the context of her times but in the context of the novels of her times. And I can report that there are many un-heroic heroes in these novels. Their chief failing is how readily they believe any malicious gossip attacking the heroine's reputation. In other cases, as with Edward Ferrars, they are trapped in circumstances arguably beyond their control. Although he should have mentioned he was engaged. See what you think of the hero of Maria, a 1785 novel by Elizabeth Blower...