This article asks why Jaucourt chose (uniquely) to cite the fictional character Zilia as an authority in several articles he wrote for the Encyclopédie, while not citing Graffigny, the author of the novel in which Zilia appears, at all. The author considers citation strategies used by Jaucourt and others in the Encyclopédie, as well as feminist scholarship on women writers and on Graffigny in particular.
Compared in her own life to Frances Burney, the novelist Elizabeth Blower has virtually disappeared from literary history. Despite this neglect, Blower's four novels reflect this writer's experiments with new literary forms during a flourishing and transformative period in the novel's evolution. Changes in this decade include the shift from epistolary to free indirect narration, the rising popularity of the gothic, and attacks on excessive sentimentality. All these developments can be traced through Blower's eight-year career as a novelist. Dissatisfied with fashionable sentimentality, Blower searched for a new kind of tragic novel, finally achieving this goal in Features from Life (1788), a detailed psychological portrait of a crumbling marriage told in a style that foreshadows Austen's. Worthy of rediscovery, Blower exemplifies the phenomenon of a fine and original writer obscured by the shadows of more canonical figures.
This article asks why Jaucourt chose (uniquely) to cite the fictional character Zilia as an authority in several articles he wrote for the Encyclopedie, while not citing Graffigny, the author of the novel in which Zilia appears, at all. The author considers citation strategies used by Jaucourt and others in the Encyclopedie, as well as feminist scholarship on women writers and on Graffigny in particular.
In this essay, I analyze the form of the epistolary novel The Woman of Colour, A Tale (1808), tracing protagonist Olivia Fairfield's future not towards narrative resolution but through the formal possibilities of epistolarity itself. Attending to the novel's editorial intrusions alongside Olivia's epistolary practice, I argue that Olivia's selective disclosure, narrative control, and acts of withholding resist editorial authority and imagine a future beyond marriage, inheritance, and white control. Situating the novel within Black feminist theories of futurity, loss, and abolition time, I argue that Olivia's epistolary practice maintains a mode of opacity and privacy through which Olivia lives in and with loss, registering loss as part of Black quotidian life lived largely in refusal rather than redemption. I end by reading Olivia's decision to return to Jamaica with Dido as an unresolved futurity shaped by legal ambiguity, risk, and the ongoing work of abolition.
