A large body of nineteenth-century British women's literature highlights the use of verbal illusions, even while its essence remains the premise of inward and personal experience. In the age of commercial distribution, the nonequivalence of personal feeling and printed product is sometimes rendered bitterly, but sometimes that nonequivalence evokes the opulence of artifice. "Colour'd Shadows" is a sequence of arguments about such relationships of material form and material exchange with literary meaning, proceeding from specific examples in the writings and careers of women writers and various publishing genres, including Victorian periodicals and literary annuals.