​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.

    This novel is a moral tale, written to persuade, or rather frighten, young people away from having sex out of wedlock. Sort of a “Reefer Madness,” but for adultery. Summersett's jeremiad is a suitable book to cap off my lengthy series on how novels of the era focused on female virtue--not that I'll be able to stay away from the topic in future book reviews, because so many novels revolve around female virtue.
    Our story begins with a female voice pleading for help, heard outside the humble cottage of Gabriel and Mary Feller. Mary used to be a servant in a posh household, and the daughter of that household was seduced by one Captain Berringer. She flees to Mary to hide her shame and to go insane after she delivers an infant boy. She then drowns herself in the river.
     Baby William is passed off by Gabriel and Mary as their nephew, but strangely, the mother gave him the surname of her seducer, who, everyone agrees, is a loathsome reptile. The rest of volume One is taken up with William’s boyhood, and meeting the girl he marries…

   The Romance of the Forest by Ann Radcliff, the queen of Gothic novels, is one of the two books which Harriet Smith recommended to Robert Martin in Emma, the other being The Children of the Abbey. Emma Woodhouse makes a fanciful connection between Harriet, a girl of illegitimate parentage, and a typically friendless and dispossessed novel heroine such as Adeline of The Romance of the Forest. It is this connection which causes Emma to fantasize that Harriet must be from genteel stock and should marry accordingly--which means she shouldn't marry Robert Martin.
   However, the Gothic plot of The Romance of the Forest (abandoned abbey, a chest with a skeleton in it, a bloody dagger, secret passages) bears no resemblance to the prosaic doings of the little village of Highbury.  Susan Allen Ford points out that Donwell Abbey, set in the English countryside under a sun bright, without being oppressive, bears no resemblance to a half-ruined abbey in a Gothic novel. The heroine Adeline is a beautiful, virtuous, and accomplished girl who shows more resolution and courage when faced with danger than Harriet did in her encounter with the gypsies.
​    But I want to discuss a minor character in Radcliffe's novel named Annette... a very minor character...