The Woman of Colour: A Tale

Content Warning: This section of the guide refers to enslavement.

Like many 19th-century English novels, The Woman of Colour takes place in a country whose landscape was being rapidly transformed by technology, industry, and commercial capitalism. The primary way these transformations make themselves visible is in the relationship between cities and rural or agricultural spaces. Olivia, who moves frequently between different types of landscapes, seems to have mixed feelings about city life but ultimately concludes that she prefers life in the country. In her descriptions, she assigns cities like London and Bristol characteristics that are commonly assigned to metropolitan spaces in novels from this period: To her, they are defined by strangeness and alienation, disorder, and lavish displays of material wealth.

When Olivia arrives in Bristol, a large port city, she immediately notices that there is a huge amount of activity even at “the still hour of evening” when the ship docks, and her natural self-confidence ebbs away as she realizes she is “entering into a world of strangers” (69). After she and Augustus marry and relocate to London, she seems to feel safer and more relaxed—perhaps because the question of whether she would marry at all has been answered—but still sees London as a slightly unsettling curiosity in which she does not wish to dwell too long.