The Woman of Colour: A Tale (1808)
Anon
This week, I want to tell you about a recent new favourite of mine, something I hadn’t even heard of until just last year. When I finally read it, I was sorry I hadn’t found it sooner because it’s absolutely tremendous! Published anonymously in 1808, The Woman of Colour is a romance novel that resists cliché, and that has much to teach us about eighteenth-century society and issues surrounding diversity and inclusivity.
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| Attributed to Jean-Étienne Liotard, Portrait of a young woman, c. 1790s (Saint Louis Art Museum) |
There has long been a completely inaccurate
assumption in popular culture that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British
society was almost totally populated with white people. Fortunately, this
notion is finally beginning to be challenged, not least through a more
accurate, representative approach to casting in TV dramas and films (albeit
dented by insidious suggestions that this kind of casting is for “political
correctness” rather than because the absence of a variety of skin-tone in eighteenth
and nineteenth century society is just plain wrong). The other trap of popular
belief is to assume eighteenth-century roles for black people must either be
slaves or servants – whilst there were sadly very many people of colour who
were enslaved during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is also very wrong
to assume that people of colour were always and only victims of labour
exploitation. In The Woman of Colour,
a mixed-race heiress recently orphaned by the death of her white slave-owner
father sets sail for England. Her name is Olivia Fairfield and her plan is to
follow her beloved father’s last request and marry the younger of her two
cousins, Mr. Augustus Merton. On the boat journey she meets an attractive
single gentleman and his elderly mother, and you might be thinking that this is
all starting to sound quite Austenian – it absolutely is of course, but it
doesn’t turn out at all the way you might be expecting it to.
Once ashore and introduced to her uncle and his
family, Miss Fairfield becomes the target of the social snobbery of her older
cousin’s wife, Mrs Merton, something that would also be quite Austenian were it
not for the fact that Mrs Merton’s campaign of snide and malevolence is barbed
with the most obnoxious racism. That Miss Fairfield is able to rise above Mrs
Merton’s wilful offensiveness is only a further indication that she is a
heroine in the truest and best sense of the word. Attempts by Mrs Merton to
categorise her ‘with the poor negro slave of the West Indies’ for example, fail
simply because a presumption that this would be insulting relies upon a
perception of race-based inferiority– something that Miss Fairfield roundly and
quite rightly rejects when she describes these people living in slavery as her
‘brethren’.
As the novel progresses, it continues to blend romance
with a humanitarian assertion of the rights of all people to equality and
freedom. Olivia Fairfield gets married (no, I’m not going to tell you who to),
but things don’t always go to plan, and it all wraps up with a final outcome
that perhaps shouldn’t be as unexpected as it is. Throughout, Olivia Fairfield is
a witty, intelligent, affectionate young woman, deeply committed to liberating
and improving the lives of people living in slavery. We don’t know who wrote
this book – perhaps we never will. In Lyndon B. Dominique’s introduction to his
superb edition of the text, he theorises that it might have been authored by one
of two sisters whose lives partially reflect that of the novel’s heroine – but
there is no absolute proof. Whoever it was, though, the novel’s biting insight
into the experience of being the target of racist abuse, together with the comparatively unusual
presentation of a genuinely independent woman who does not consider marriage to
be the only means of achieving happiness, must surely make it extremely likely
that the author of this extraordinary work was, like its title, a woman of
colour.
Happy Reading everyone!
You can find this novel here:
The Woman of
Colour: A Tale, ed. by Lyndon J. Dominique (Broadview Press, 2007)
(available at most good bookstores – if they haven’t
got a copy, they should be able to order it in).