The Dead Letter Office is perhaps the most intriguing title on the list of novels associated with the anonymous author of The Woman of Colour (1808),  A "dead letter office" suggests many exciting plot possibilities. (Should I explain for the kids that this is the department of a post office where undeliverable letters end up?)  The subtitle--A Tale for the English Farmer’s Fireside--also teaches us something about book publishing in Jane Austen’s era, but I’ll get back to that.
     I was not able to read it until I visited England recently and looked at a copy in the British Library. I discovered it is not a novel with a plot built around the dead letter department of a post office. It is a pastiche, a collection of individual letters with no connection to one another except that they all portray folly or greed or vanity. A young man who works at the post office in London visits his aunt, an “antiquated spinster” (who is also the narrator), and shares letters which have ended up in the dead letter office with her. They are intended (naturally) to teach a moral lesson. 
     So we have some miscellaneous writings--what was called, in those days, "fugitive pieces"--including a poem, which could have lain in the author’s desk for years, patched together to eke out a two-volume publication. This author had already produced six novels in seven years for the publisher Benjamin Crosby, but after this title, there was to be only one more, The Splendour of Adversity (1814). The Crosby publishing firm declared bankruptcy in 1814.
​    The "dead letters" account for about half of the content of this two-volume title. The letters are basically mini short stories, similar to the short fiction pieces you will find in periodicals of the era, such as The Lady's Magazine. I won’t give details of all the letters, but here’s a sampling...

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. 

   For some months now, I've been churning my way through 21 novels, novels which may or may not have been written by the same anonymous author who wrote The Woman of Colour (1808) To recap, The Woman of Colour has attracted a lot of attention in academic circles because the protagonist is a mixed-race Jamaican heiress, instead of the usual blue-eyed, auburn-haired heroine of this era. My review of the novel is here. I thought that discovering the author of this significant anonymous work might be a very fun quest.
    Most of the academic enquiry into The Woman of Colour does not center around the quality of the writing, but around the historical and political implications of a novel from 1808 featuring a mixed-race heroine. Only one group of scholars, so far as I am aware, have attempted to seek out the author by analyzing the text and comparing it with other texts. The results were amusing, because the "stylometric" software declared that Jane Austen was a likely candidate! And no, absolutely not. If the program can't tell the difference between Austen's sublime, sarcastic prose and the--let's be honest here--absolutely average prose stylings in The Woman of Colour, then the software is useless. 
       There are two, or should I say three, main candidates for authorship of The WOC. I had hoped that by reading the novels, I would find the distinctive fingerprint of the author. While it's been interesting, it has not been definitive. I have concluded that many of the novels were written by the same person, especially the later novels, but the texts themselves did not provide evidence as to the identity of the author...​

     I'm sharing this information with anyone who might be researching The Woman of Colour and the attribution chain of 21 anonymous novels from six different publishers. This is one tangled attribution chain, and it's been difficult to visualize it. I hope this helps.
​     The first table gives the titles by genre, and by whether they are epistolary or narrative. I have not been able to read the early novel Federetta, so I can't confirm it's genre. By genre, I am distinguishing between books which are straightforward marriage-plot novels, and those that, like The Woman of Colour, don't have a conventional happy ending. As you can see, the earlier novels are mostly sentimental novels, while many of the later novels feature a heroine who is not married at the conclusion of the story. This includes, of course, The Woman of Colour. Many of the later use the "good girl/bad girl" approach, with the heroine finding happiness and her heedless friend or sister running into disaster. The Woman of Colour and one other novel are written in epistolary style. The Dead Letter Office, which is a pastiche book, not a single novel, also contains many letters which are not connected together into a single plot. A novella included in the volume, A Tale for the English Farmer's fireside, is a good girl/bad girl story. but not epistolary, so I have categorized The Dead Letter Office as a good girl/bad girl story.
    The "by the Author of" column shows the books published earlier which are referenced on the title page of each book. The second column shows the novels which later referenced the title on their own title pages.
      The second graphic shows more clearly the fact that Light and Shade (1803) is the linchpin on the attribution chain. It is the only novel that has the older titles on its "by the author page." Then it's like a new chain starts, only referencing the titles published in 1803 and after.
    There are many mysteries. Why no attributions on the title page of The Aunt and the Niece? And why did the publisher, Crosby, merely say that A Winter in Bath was from the author of "two popular novels" instead of being specific? And if one woman wrote all the Crosby novels in the latter part of the table, why didn't Crosby publish A Woman of Colour? Why did it go to a different publisher? Crosby acknowledged the existence of the novel in later attributions.
   For those not aware, the Crosby publishing house was more prestigious than the Minerva publishing house.

     I've read and reviewed most of the novels in this chain. Sorry I was not able to link each title to my review, but if you click on the category "The Woman of Colour mystery" at upper right, you can see all the relevant posts. Update: I fixed some errors in my attribution chart. There are six different publishers, not five.