Epistolarity and Black Futurity in The Woman of Colour

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.