The Woman of Colour. A Tale. Anonymous (1808) (review)

How timely it is that, in the wake of the bicentenary of the “Abolition Act,” Broadview Press has reissued this extraordinary but critically neglected novel for the first time since its original publication a year after the Parliamentary Act abolishing the importation of slaves into British colonies. There is much to intrigue the reader in this epistolary tale. Olivia Fairfield, the aptly named eponymous woman of colour, departs from contemporary conventions of heroine ontology only in that she is the illegitimate daughter of a slave and a planter. She is beautiful and virtuous (of course), and not too dark. Even as she is regarded as an anomaly by English white people, Olivia exemplifies many of the ideological and ontological contradictions experienced and exemplified by free people of colour in Jamaica, many of whom thought of themselves as Britons, were opposed to Abolition, and owned slaves. As E.K. Brathwaite observes, Jamaica was “a society that was not designed for them, and did not really recognize them (or at least did so very reluctantly),” and yet coloured people were “loyal to the Establishment, and were seen to be so” (Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971], 174, 193). Until 1830, free people of colour were subject to numerous civil and legal “disabilities”: they were limited as to how much property they could inherit; they could not appear as judicial witnesses; they could not vote; they could not enter the theatre by the same door as whites; separate pews were designated for white people and people of colour in the Anglican church; and they were not buried in the same burial grounds.

The novel does not detail the restraints Olivia would have experienced in Jamaica, nor does it advance any extended political debates about Abolition, although the subject is raised from time to time. Olivia aligns herself with Jamaican and English people, black and white, deploying an elastic first-person plural pronoun: “We are considered an inferior race, but little removed from the brutes, because the Almighty Maker of all created beings has tinged our skins with jet instead of ivory! —I say our, for though the jet has been faded to the olive in my own complexion, I am not ashamed to acknowledge my affinity with the swarthiest negro that was ever brought from Guinea’s coast!— All, all are brethren, children of one common Parent!” Elsewhere the heroine refers to “our own dear Cowper” but cites “your country” when describing beautiful English women.

In spite of her pious protestations of kin with negroes, Olivia is not a slave, nor would she have been designated “a black” except by those who wished to insult her. Her history is typical enough: her enslaved African mother, Marcia, was purchased by Mr Fairfield and became his concubine. Once enlightened by Christianity, Marcia shrunk with horror from her sexual sin; her master would not marry her; she conveniently “paid the debt of nature,” leaving behind a child who was evidently emancipated by her father. At the beginning of the novel, Fairfield has died, leaving a will stipulating that Olivia must marry her cousin Augustus Merton in England. If the match is made and Merton changes his name to Fairfield, Augustus will inherit the dower of £60,000 bequeathed to Olivia; if the match is refused, Olivia’s dowry will devolve to Augustus’s elder brother.

The testamentary clause is decried by Olivia’s correspondent as “strange and unheard of,” although the introduction rightly notes that it contains shades of Cecilia. As in Burney’s novel, the patriarchal will gives rise to a number of conflicts between and within the characters. In an important departure from the telos of contemporary courtship novels, Olivia is finally left single—widowed, as she calls it. In the introduction, Lyndon J. Dominique interprets this as a narrative refusal of Cecilia and other novels’ “romanticization of marital enslavement,” asserting that as...