The Country and the City and the Colony in The Woman of Colour

Early in the anonymously written 1808 epistolary novel The Woman of Colour, the heroine, recently arrived in England, confides in a letter to a friend that she is “disappointed in England.” Having expected to encounter “sensible, liberal, well informed and rational people,” she has instead met only “folly and dissimulation.” Such a sentiment in a novel from this period might otherwise be unremarkable were it not for the fact that Olivia Fairfield is both an heiress and the offspring of a black mother and white father: her mother was a slave and her father was a wealthy plantation owner in Jamaica. Upon her beloved father’s death and as stipulated in his will, Olivia has come to England to marry her cousin, the virtuous and liberal-minded Augustus Merton. While Olivia has no difficulty imagining a future with her cousin, Augustus proves to have a complex past that involves an obstacle to their happy union: he was married years ago to a penniless orphan, Angelina Forrester, and though he truly admires Olivia, he is unable to love her because of this prior commitment. The bulk of the narrative, which consists largely of letters written by Olivia to her friend Mrs. Milbanke, turns on Olivia trying to read her increasingly inscrutable husband, and acclimatizing to life in England, a world she finds alien, inhospitable, and wanting in virtue, among other things. Olivia’s disappointment with city life in particular has her hoping that Augustus will similarly “prefer [her] plan of a country life and retirement.” Pondering such questions, Olivia muses in her letter: “shall I ever more enjoy that placid happiness, that calm tranquillity, which surrounded me at the Fairfield plantation?” The alignment, in this instance, of her father’s Jamaican plantation with the height of country and rural virtue is striking, to say the least. How is it possible that this novel can align plantation slavery, and by extension colonial wealth, with pastoral and rural purity? Indeed, the narrative’s representation of Olivia’s father is utterly antithetical in this respect to the popular image of the Jamaican planter in the late eighteenth century. As David Beck Ryden has observed, “West Indian planters, their families, and their descendants were regarded as conspicuously rich by anyone’s standards in early modern Britain.” “The wealth of Jamaican absentees,” he continues, Olivia describes her father, by contrast, not as an absentee planter, but as conscientiously grounded in his estate, thoughtfully and capably tending to all and each. Unlike in the novel, the caricature of the Jamaican absentee planter in the popular British imagination turned precisely on his extreme negligence and neglect. As Ryden suggests, “The political power of the Jamaican planter reached its height during the late eighteenth century. Buoyed by the climbing sugar prices in the 1790s, the island’s political and economic elites left the colony for Britain in increasing numbers, where the prototypical absentee split his time between an exclusive London residence and a manor home in rural Britain.” Olivia’s father bears no resemblance whatsoever to those London-living, high-flying absentees who, as Ryden puts it, “lived up to the Jamaicans’ reputation for excess.” On the contrary, Mr. Fairfield stands as the absolute antithesis of those characters in the novel devoted to lives of fashion and dissipation. This essay will take up the seeming incoherence of the novel—the idea that plantation slavery is posited as the locus of rural virtue—in order to argue that the ideological contradiction at the novel’s heart is, if not quite resolved, at least contained, in that the novel’s antislavery politics is premised on a total refusal of economic logic as such. There is …