Who Wrote It? The Woman of Colour and Adventures in Stylometry

This essay explores the methods of computational analysis for authorship attribution (stylometry), using The Woman of Colour as a case study. It compares the novel against a corpus of British women writers and a corpus of texts with Caribbean authors or themes. It examines the biases and limits of these methods from the perspective of both statistics and literature, by exploring the concepts of authorship, writing style, prevalence, sample size, and machine learning algorithms. This exploration of stylometric methods is relevant because many eighteenth-century novels were published anonymously and because of the increasing availability of and scholarly interest in digital analysis of texts and authorship attribution, especially for texts by women and minority writers.