ABSTRACT
In this essay Lyndon Dominique situates Olivia Fairfield from The Woman of Colour and that novel’s liberationist politics against some of Olivia’s unusual predecessors—cats and black ladies that are created and politicised in texts by Aphra Behn and John Dunton. The essay demonstrates that these literary cats and black ladies are only partially successful in dispersing political messages to British readers about liberating themselves from abusive and monarchical forms of authoritarian control. However, despite their flaws, these texts and others like them allow critics to begin to see the benefits of creating an eighteenth-century umbrella of political blackness before and after The Woman of Colour. These benefits include a broader political framework for understanding liberation, anonymity and social justice in eighteenth-century British literature as well as a richer context for reading one of Austen’s political works.
