The Woman of Colour and Black Atlantic Movement

Abstract

In the anonymous 1808 novel The Woman of Colour, A Tale, the motherly Mrs. Honeywood imagines our protagonist, Olivia Fairfield, and her Jamaican servant, Dido, illustrated in a painting. Mimicking the black woman’s racially marked speech, Mrs. Honeywood muses, “I would give something to be able to take dat brush and dat bit of paper, Dido … and paint your lady and yourself, as you are now placed before my eyes” (57).¹ The painting she describes is not unusual. According to Beth Fowkes Tobin, toward the end of the eighteenth century, the increasing presence of black servants in paintings reflected imperialism’s “incorporation of the exotic into domestic life” (29–30). An alternative appears on the cover of the novel’s 2008 Broadview edition, which bears a portion of the c. 1779 double portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray (Figure 11.1). Framed for a novel with a mixed-race heroine, the book displays only Elizabeth’s darker cousin, Dido, daughter of the white Englishman Sir John Lindsay and Maria Belle, an enslaved black woman.²