| This blog explores social attitudes in Jane Austen's time, discusses her novels, reviews forgotten 18th century novels, and throws some occasional shade at the modern academy. The introductory post is here. My "six simple questions for academics" post is here. Spoilers abound in my discussion of these forgotten novels, and I discuss 18th-century attitudes which I do not necessarily endorse. This post is one in a continuing series in which I look at the novels which were possibly written by the same author who wrote The Woman of Colour (1808). |
CMP#247 Wrapping up The Woman of Colour Mystery, for now
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...
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...
"Creole Woman and Servants" by Agostino Brunias (detail) Textual clues
I have found many similarities in language and plot tropes between The WOC and the other novels in the chain--but, I must report, that one could find the same similarities between just about any novel written in this period. We may have an unusual heroine in The WOC--but the language, the religious sentiments, and the mechanics, so to speak, of these novels, have no unique fingerprint. For example, I wondered if the way the virtuous characters in the novels refer to God as the "Supreme Being," or the "Divine Disposer of Events" might be distinctive. Austen, if she refers to God at all, refers obliquely to Providence. But it turns out this is not distinctive enough. Dozens of novelists employed the term "Divine Disposer of Events." (I checked this out by doing text searches on the invaluable Corvey Collection of digitized novels.)
How clichéd is the language? You might know about the time Jane Austen told her niece Fanny, who was writing a novel, to avoid the phrase "the vortex of dissipation." She wrote: "I cannot bear the expression, it is such thorough Novel Slang--and so old, that I dare say Adam met with it in the first novel he opened." Well, several of the novels use the actual phrase, "vortex of dissipation." Or "vortex of folly" or "vortex of unmeaning pleasure," and so on. So do dozens or hundreds of other novels.
I have found many similarities in language and plot tropes between The WOC and the other novels in the chain--but, I must report, that one could find the same similarities between just about any novel written in this period. We may have an unusual heroine in The WOC--but the language, the religious sentiments, and the mechanics, so to speak, of these novels, have no unique fingerprint. For example, I wondered if the way the virtuous characters in the novels refer to God as the "Supreme Being," or the "Divine Disposer of Events" might be distinctive. Austen, if she refers to God at all, refers obliquely to Providence. But it turns out this is not distinctive enough. Dozens of novelists employed the term "Divine Disposer of Events." (I checked this out by doing text searches on the invaluable Corvey Collection of digitized novels.)
How clichéd is the language? You might know about the time Jane Austen told her niece Fanny, who was writing a novel, to avoid the phrase "the vortex of dissipation." She wrote: "I cannot bear the expression, it is such thorough Novel Slang--and so old, that I dare say Adam met with it in the first novel he opened." Well, several of the novels use the actual phrase, "vortex of dissipation." Or "vortex of folly" or "vortex of unmeaning pleasure," and so on. So do dozens or hundreds of other novels.
Recycled Plots
The plot of The WOC uses the familiar novelist's standby of deceit and misunderstanding. A scheming villainess perpetrates a fraud upon the extraordinarily passive hero. When our heroine retreats to a solitary cottage in Wales, several people she knows just happen to be related to each other and just happen to live in the same neighbourhood. In other words, there would be no distinguishing the basic mechanics of this novel from the plots of hundreds of other novels.
Let me give an example. In another novel in the attribution chain, A Winter in Bath (reviewed here), the heroine is about to receive a marriage proposal from a sardonic but intelligent young nobleman she's met in Bath. He makes a formal appointment to come and speak to her. But he doesn't show up. Much later, she learns that he was in love with a sweet girl from an undistinguished family. His mother told him that the girl, who lived in a remote part of Scotland, was dead. He believed her, and he was nursing a broken heart but thought that our heroine Adriana would make a good wife. But then he discovers the girl he loves is not dead after all! So he rushes off to be reunited with her. It's okay, by the way, our heroine marries a man she loves anyway.
It's easy to suppose that the author who wrote A Winter in Bath also wrote The Woman of Colour, in which Augustus marries Olivia, and he likes and respects her, but doesn't explain to her that he is pining for his wife, who he thinks is dead. After they've been married for a while, guess who pops up. So, very similar plot twists. In fact the author of the later novels used bigamy, intentional or not, very frequently in her plots.
That ties the novels together, but it does not identity a writer. Unless I can find a female writer whose husband committed bigamy, maybe.
The plot of The WOC uses the familiar novelist's standby of deceit and misunderstanding. A scheming villainess perpetrates a fraud upon the extraordinarily passive hero. When our heroine retreats to a solitary cottage in Wales, several people she knows just happen to be related to each other and just happen to live in the same neighbourhood. In other words, there would be no distinguishing the basic mechanics of this novel from the plots of hundreds of other novels.
Let me give an example. In another novel in the attribution chain, A Winter in Bath (reviewed here), the heroine is about to receive a marriage proposal from a sardonic but intelligent young nobleman she's met in Bath. He makes a formal appointment to come and speak to her. But he doesn't show up. Much later, she learns that he was in love with a sweet girl from an undistinguished family. His mother told him that the girl, who lived in a remote part of Scotland, was dead. He believed her, and he was nursing a broken heart but thought that our heroine Adriana would make a good wife. But then he discovers the girl he loves is not dead after all! So he rushes off to be reunited with her. It's okay, by the way, our heroine marries a man she loves anyway.
It's easy to suppose that the author who wrote A Winter in Bath also wrote The Woman of Colour, in which Augustus marries Olivia, and he likes and respects her, but doesn't explain to her that he is pining for his wife, who he thinks is dead. After they've been married for a while, guess who pops up. So, very similar plot twists. In fact the author of the later novels used bigamy, intentional or not, very frequently in her plots.
That ties the novels together, but it does not identity a writer. Unless I can find a female writer whose husband committed bigamy, maybe.
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) The Usual Suspects
I have mentioned the main candidates for authorship in previous posts: Mrs. E.M. Foster, who identified herself by the initials "E.M.F." in two of the early books in the attribution list, and Mrs. E.G. Bayfield. I have uncovered the identity and life-story of Mrs. Bayfield, and it is an interesting one, but it is not part of The WOC story, so I won't get into it here. In earlier posts, I have credited Mrs. Bayfield with the authorship because her name appears in library catalogues and I was working with the hypothesis that she wrote the later novels in the chain. But now I understand that Mrs. Bayfield is credited with the novels because of a cataloguing error. You see, she wrote a (now lost) novel which her publisher titled A Winter at Bath in 1807, the same year that our anonymous author published a novel titled A Winter in Bath. Someone confused these two titles, and that's how Mrs. Bayfield came to be a potential author for The WOC. I'm not going to go back and change all my posts which mention Mrs. Bayfield, but I will post some updates.
Mrs. E.M. Foster remains a mystery. Her name could well be a pseudonym. The chance of tracking down her identity through genealogical records seems very slim. But one thing we can say is that if she wrote the early novels, I don't think she could be the author of the later novels, including The WOC. As average as the later novels are, the early novels were worse. Part of that, I suppose, is a matter of changing tastes. Today, we don't want heroes who fall on one knee and rave like lunatics, we don't want heroines who are "pictures of perfection," and many people would not care for books that advise us to resign ourselves to the fates meted out by Divine Disposer of Events. E.M.F.'s narrations are wooden, her language is trite, and her dialogue veers between stilted and hyperbolic. And the amazing coincidences can get comical.
A final candidate for the authorship of The WOC is an actual mixed-race heiress named Ann Wright Maitland. Her life story bears some resemblance to Olivia Fairfield. I haven't seen any other evidence to back up the conjecture, though. I'll expand on my thoughts on that sometime in the future.
I am going to take up a new project, which is reading novels from this era which name-drop Mary Wollstonecraft.
I have mentioned the main candidates for authorship in previous posts: Mrs. E.M. Foster, who identified herself by the initials "E.M.F." in two of the early books in the attribution list, and Mrs. E.G. Bayfield. I have uncovered the identity and life-story of Mrs. Bayfield, and it is an interesting one, but it is not part of The WOC story, so I won't get into it here. In earlier posts, I have credited Mrs. Bayfield with the authorship because her name appears in library catalogues and I was working with the hypothesis that she wrote the later novels in the chain. But now I understand that Mrs. Bayfield is credited with the novels because of a cataloguing error. You see, she wrote a (now lost) novel which her publisher titled A Winter at Bath in 1807, the same year that our anonymous author published a novel titled A Winter in Bath. Someone confused these two titles, and that's how Mrs. Bayfield came to be a potential author for The WOC. I'm not going to go back and change all my posts which mention Mrs. Bayfield, but I will post some updates.
Mrs. E.M. Foster remains a mystery. Her name could well be a pseudonym. The chance of tracking down her identity through genealogical records seems very slim. But one thing we can say is that if she wrote the early novels, I don't think she could be the author of the later novels, including The WOC. As average as the later novels are, the early novels were worse. Part of that, I suppose, is a matter of changing tastes. Today, we don't want heroes who fall on one knee and rave like lunatics, we don't want heroines who are "pictures of perfection," and many people would not care for books that advise us to resign ourselves to the fates meted out by Divine Disposer of Events. E.M.F.'s narrations are wooden, her language is trite, and her dialogue veers between stilted and hyperbolic. And the amazing coincidences can get comical.
A final candidate for the authorship of The WOC is an actual mixed-race heiress named Ann Wright Maitland. Her life story bears some resemblance to Olivia Fairfield. I haven't seen any other evidence to back up the conjecture, though. I'll expand on my thoughts on that sometime in the future.
I am going to take up a new project, which is reading novels from this era which name-drop Mary Wollstonecraft.
So do I have an opinion about who wrote The Woman of Colour? Yes, I do. But I'll get back to that later... For anyone else wanting to study the authorial attribution chain, I've posted a handy table showing which novel was "by the author of" which other novel.
Previous: WOC attributions Next: Mrs. Bayfield's "chaste and classical pen"
Previous: WOC attributions Next: Mrs. Bayfield's "chaste and classical pen"
| Update: I've been re-reading Ann H. Jones's excellent work Ideas and Innovations: Best Sellers of Jane Austen's Age, (1986) and she describes the penchant for avoiding the word "God": “because of the religious tenor of so many novels of the period, one of their striking features is the proliferation of circumlocutions aimed to allow the author or character to refer to God without actually using the word itself—circumlocutions like 'the Supreme Being,' 'The Searcher of Hearts,' and 'the Father of Light and Mercy,'... also found in nonfiction writing." . Harol, Corrinne; Lewis, Brynn; Lele, Subhash (2020). "Who Wrote It? The Woman of Colour and Adventures in Stylometry". Eighteenth-Century Fiction. 32 (2): 341–353. doi:10.3138/ecf.32.2.341. ISSN 1911-0243. S2CID 242604526. Retrieved 10 January 2021. |
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