Women's Authorship and the Early Gothic

Legacies and Innovations

Kathleen Hudson

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781786836106
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786836120
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This edited collection examines Gothic works written by women authors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with a specific focus on the novels and chapbooks produced by less widely commercially and critically popular writers. Bringing these authors to the forefront of contemporary critical examinations of the Gothic, chapters in this collection examine how these works impacted the development of 'women's writing' and Gothic writing during this time. Offering readers an original look at the literary landscape of the period and the roles of the creative women who defined it, the collection argues that such works reflected a female-centred literary subculture defined by creative exchange and innovation, one that still shapes perceptions of the Gothic mode today. This collection, then, presents an alternative understanding of the legacy of women Gothic authors, anchoring this understanding in complex historical and social contexts and providing a new world of Gothic literature for readers to explore.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Illustration
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 The Alternative Genealogies: (Re)tracing the Origins of Women’s Gothic in Sophia Lee’s The Recess and Mrs Carver’s The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey
• 2 Gothic before Gothic: Minerva Press Reviews, Gender and the Evolution of Genre
• 3 What ‘Poor Mrs Kelly’ Saw: Isabella Kelly Reads The Monk
• 4 Mary Robinson’s Gothic and the Prison of Gender
• 5 Adopting the ‘Orphan’: Literary Exchange and Appropriation in Eleanor Sleath’s The Orphan of the Rhine
• 6 The Fiction of Mary Julia Young: Female Trade Gothic and Romantic Genre-Mixing
• 7 Sarah Wilkinson and J. F. Hughes: A Literary Relationship
• 8 Negotiating Gothic Nationalisms in Ann Radcliffe’s Post-1797 Texts: Gaston de Blondeville (1826) and St. Alban’s Abbey (1808)
• 9 Regina Maria Roche’s The Children of the Abbey (1796): Its Literary Life and Afterlife
• 10 Self-haunted Heroines: Remapping the Generic ‘I’ back into Romantic Subjectivities
• Notes
• Bibliography