My article about Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius is now live at the History Reclaimed website. It's an honour to have my contribution to the debate about the BBC shared at a site founded by so many eminent historians and academics. Below is additional material that I did not include in my article for reasons of length. 
  In an earlier post, I  decried a BBC documentary on Shakespeare that astonished me for the amount of misinformation it conveyed. Now it's time to clutch my pearls over the same treatment meted out to Jane Austen.  ​I didn’t see this documentary when it aired in the UK in May, but I recently found it on an online streaming service
     If you are in need of another eye-opening lecture on slavery, colonialism, empire, class prejudice and economic injustice, set to a soundtrack of driving violins, this is the program you've been looking for. If, however, you assumed a program called "Rise of a Genius" would offer an explication of Austen’s wit and her unique talents, you will be disappointed. You can get a sample of the mood of this program by viewing this preview here. 
   The BBC has given us many shows on Jane Austen over the years, on both radio and television, and if you stack these older programs up against this one, you will see  how respect for serious scholarship has been replaced with—whatever this is. If this is the best that the BBC could muster for Austen’s 250th birthday, then the BBC is a hollowed-out shell, a travesty of a mockery of a sham...

    Rebecca is one of 22 novels that may—or may not—have been written by the author of the 1809 novel The Woman of Colour, a book which has attracted a lot of academic interest in recent years. I’ve been entertaining myself by reading these novels to see if I can find similarities to The Woman of Colour.
   Rebecca, published in 1799, is one of the earliest in this chain of novels which stretches from 1795, with the historical novel The Duke of Clarence, to 1817 and The Revealer of Secrets. One similarity worth noting is that the father of Olivia Fairfield in The Woman of Colour, and the father of Rebecca Elton in this novel, both tell their daughters who they should marry in their last will and testament.
    I have a lot to say about Rebecca, even though it is a minor, third-rate novel. It earned only a brief literary snort from the London Review, which quoted a bit of dialogue: “Ah, Rebecca! How shall I part with you?” to which the reviewer answered: “Without a sigh!”
   Yes, the dialogue is often clichéd (and exceedingly florid to our modern tastes) and the narration is stilted. In that respect, we can contrast this authoress with Jane Austen. We can compare the themes and tropes of other novels of this era, and at some point, I’ll come back to it to discuss more similarities to The Woman of Colour, but not quite yet...

​Disclaimer: When I quote opinions from this two hundred-year-old book, I am not endorsing them. 
    In an early post on this blog, I referenced Matilda, or, the Barbadoes Girl (1816) by the prolific author Barbara Hofland as an example of a book which openly discussed enslavement, plantations, and the slave trade. I was countering the argument that Jane Austen had to pull her punches when discussing slavery. Hofland's pro-abolition opinions, stated openly by the "good" characters in the book, were not controversial at the time, even in a book written for children.
    The abolitionist message of this book reflects the reality that evangelical Christians were the driving force behind the anti-slavery crusade in England. That said, the moral issue of slavery and the welfare of enslaved persons is subordinate to the personal reformation of the main character, a spoiled daughter of a planter who repents of her bad temper and selfish behavior after she is taken into a loving Christian household. In addition, the topic of slavery is left behind in favour of a different moral danger in the last chapters of the book.
       Matilda, or, The Barbadoes Girl was reprinted for over fifty years, which is pretty good innings for an author. In most editions, the title is simply The Barbadoes Girl. I have not found any contemporary reviews. One American journal praised Mrs. Hofland’s “interesting little stories which are not less marked with tenderness than with morality” but the reviewer admitted he had not had time to read The Barbadoes Girl. Here is a synopsis...

​    The Woman of Colour, first published in 1809, has drawn a lot of interest in academic circles because the heroine is a mixed-race woman of colour. It was certainly an unusual and perhaps daring choice to have a main character who is a sympathetic, intelligent, educated woman of colour who can quote Shakespeare, Cowper and Milton, The novel is remarkable in that sense, and it is a little bit unusual because it does not end with a marriage, but it is not, as we will see, remarkable for its literary quality. It is a typical sentimental and didactic novel of the long 18th century.
    Olivia is the illegitimate daughter of an enslaved woman and a plantation-owner. This sounds like a pretty serious bar to admittance in "good" society. But she is also heiress to 60 thousand pounds, three times more than Mary Crawford had in Mansfield Park, and ten thousand more than Miss Grey had in Sense and Sensibility. Further, we should not be surprised to learn that Olivia’s mother was “majestic,” beautiful,” “sprung from a race of native kings and heroes,” and a convert to Christianity.
    Once you know Olivia’s mother was descended from African royalty and that she was an artless and confiding Christian girl in love with a white man, and if you know your 18th century tropes, you will know she's dead: “In giving birth to me she paid the debt of nature and went down to that grave, where the captive is made free!”
   This is an epistolary novel, so the voice you hear is Olivia Fairfield, writing to her “earliest and best friend," her governess Mrs. Milbanke. Let's hope the ship she's sailing on has fewer holes in its hull than this book has plot-holes, the first one being: If Mrs. Milbanke is a governess, why doesn't Olivia just pay for her to come along on the voyage? She really does need a respectable older escort in a situation like this.​ But of course Mrs. Milbanke is a device for exposition, not a character in the novel.