A Public Thematic Index of The Woman of Colour: A Tale
This is a class project completed by the students in ENGL 147, “Black Romanticism,” at Santa Clara University in Spring term of 2023.
This course approaches the Romantic literary period from the perspective of centering Black lives and experiences, and especially those of women. We began by studying the anonymously published novel The Woman of Colour: A Tale (1808, anon.) and made this novel the axis for the rest of the term. Following the novel, we dove deeply into the recently published and energetic critical conversation on this tale published in Eighteenth-Century Fiction volume 35.1, “New Essays on The Woman of Colour,” edited by Nicole N. Aljoe, Kerry Sinanan, and Mariam Wassif. We studied the volume’s introductory essay together and each selected an article to respond to individually and created a web of connections between each scholarly response. After in-class collaboration, we made our social intellectual approach to the published critical conversation public by tweeting to and with the authors of the issue in an effort to realize the human connection between readers, scholars, and their scholarship.
We next studied a series of related primary texts, both nonfiction and fiction, that also foreground different experiences of Black writers and characters: The History of Mary Prince (1831), Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1858), and finally Stella: A Novel of the Haitian Revolution by Émeric Bergeaud (1859). Alongside these, we considered relevant peer-reviewed scholarship to broaden understandings of context and also to discover alternative analyses of the primary texts.
Returning to The Woman of Colour: A Tale, we considered the make-up of the Broadview edition, edited by Lyndon Dominique. There are many valuable resources baked into this critical edition, before and after the main body of the novel, to provide context related to writers of color, protagonists of color, social context, and reviews of the novel just after it was published. These include:
- An introduction essay
- A chronology of women of color in drama and long prose fiction
- Appendix A: Lucy Peacock’s poem
- Appendix B: Anonymous poem “written by a [Mixed] Woman”
- Appendix C: Minor Heiresses of Color in British Long Prose Fiction (5 selections)
- Appendix D: Historical and Social Accounts of People of Color in Jamaica (3 selections)
- Appendix E: People of Color in British Epistolary Narratives (x4)
- Appendix F: Contemporary Reviews of the novel (x2)
While we found these resources helpful for positioning the reader within a constellation of materials outside of the book, it was missing the same kind of orienting critical apparatus toward the body of the novel itself. Therefore, our class has created an annotated keyword index in a digital format that can continue to grow.