​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? 

CMP#261   Book Review: The Banks of the Wye: or, Two Summers at Clifton (1808)​

​     The Banks of the Wye is one of 21 novels in the attribution chain involving the 1808 novel The Woman of Colour. This is a novel which has ben speculated about and commented on in academic circles because it was so unusual to have a mixed-race protagonist in a novel of this era.
     For more about the attribution chain (“by the author of”) and how it relates to the mystery of who wrote The Woman of Colour, click here. I was not able to read The Banks of the Wye when I was reading my way through the other novels earlier this year, because it is not digitized. Last month, however, I visited England and spent several mornings reading it in one of the peaceful and sedate Reading Rooms of the British Library.
      Now that I’ve read every book in the attribution chain but one (Fedaretta), I would nominate The Banks of the Wye as the best-written of the 21 novels, with The House That Jack Built as a close second. The anonymous authoress sustains her story through four volumes. She sets up her major plot points with skilful foreshadowing, telling us the story of a young bride named Teresa who went astray, and then reiterating her doom in the life of her granddaughter. She handles a lot of characters and sub-plots and keeps them all in motion. It was a frequent fault of novelists of this time to introduce a gallery of crazy characters just for the sake of having crazy characters—such as, an assortment of people at a vacation resort. The Banks of the Wye’s comic characters are not there just to be ridiculous; they play some part in the plot. My favourite is Miss Patience Perkyns, a woman on the wrong side of thirty who haunts vacation spots in search of a husband and makes a lot of noise about her maiden virtue. 

     The pseudonymous authoress Mrs. Martha Homely knew that the first unrelentingly weepy and overwrought volume of Maids As They Are is notably different from the livelier scandal-ridden subsequent volumes, and in her foreword she “entreats those who are fatigued at the melancholy of her first volume” to hang in there. Volume Two introduces Lady Lucy and her two sisters, more wickedly captivating than her heroine. Of course they are only there to be held up as a bad example. Of course!
    The story centers around our beautiful and virtuous heroine Theodora Cameron. Actually, the first chapter traces the family line back to the time of good Queen Anne, but the family tree collapses as the authoress dispatches Theodora’s aunt, then her uncle the baronet, then Theodora’s mother, then her father. We’re left with Theodora and her cousin Evelin Cameron, the only remaining male heir to the baronetcy. They are in fact double first cousins, because their fathers are twin brothers (the one who popped out first was the baronet) who married sisters. Their parents intended them for each other from their cradles. No genetic counselors in this little Welsh village, evidently...

   I first learned about the anti-Jacobins and the culture war that raged between supporters of the French Revolution versus the conservative old guard in Marilyn Butler’s important book, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975). 
  Jacobins were one of the revolutionary groups that turned France upside down during the Reign of Terror which followed the overthrow of the monarchy. The British establishment and of course, many ordinary patriotic Britons, were worried about revolutionary fervor spreading across the Channel. While progressives such as Tom Paine hailed the reform (or overthrow) of organized religion, primogeniture, and the aristocracy, conservative-minded folk also picked up their quill pens to defend the status quo. Some founded The Anti-Jacobin Review to warn about the dangers of political radicalism. This included castigating French philosophers like Rousseau and Voltaire, and German writers like Goethe and Kotzbue. Once you delve into the back and forth, there is a shock of recognition--it’s comparable to the cultural and political wars raging today.
    Conservatives (and I am using the word as a descriptor, not a slur) saw not only a political threat but a threat to established social customs. They particularly feared any liberalization of divorce laws or any whiff of what today we would call feminism. Some authors used satire and ridicule  to combat progressive ideas, notably Elizabeth Hamilton in her Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800). In the example below, the author of Scenes of Life used the direct attack to condemn the new radicalism and progressivism.