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...

​    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...

    ​We could say that Laetitia Matilda Hawkins has no one but herself to blame if her novels and essays were erroneously attributed to Eliza Kirkham Mathews. She published anonymously. Her novel Constance (1785) was advertised as “the first literary attempt of a young lady.” Her subsequent collection of essays, titled Pharos (a reference to lighthouses), was advertised as being by the author of Constance, and so on.
    Eliza Kirkham Mathews, by contrast, wanted to put her name on the title page of her novel What Has Been (1801). She had published her first collection of poems under her maiden name of Eliza Kirkham Strong, but when it came to her novel, her brother-in-law advised her against it. He seems to have had doubts about whether the novel would do well and therefore, the safer thing to do would be to publish anonymously. If the book sold well, she could always claim authorship later. However, we know that EKM did in fact write What Has Been  even though her name is not on the title page because (1) the publication of the novel is documented in her husband's biography, (2) it contains poems which had previously been published under her (maiden) name, and (3) she drew on her own life for the plot.
    But since EKM is still being listed as the author for Constance-- a book published when she was 13 years old, we might as well build an objective case for showing why these books were written by two different hands. For this task, I enlisted the help of Artificial Intelligence to study the sentence patterns and grammar. However, I have read both of these novels and am not relying on AI for my conclusions.

    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…