Intersections and Metamorphoses of the ‘Female Gothic’

Between the 1790s and the 1820s, more than fifty women writers wrote in what we now call the Gothic genre. Since that time until the present, Gothic literature appealed to female writers not just as authors but also as critics and as readers. In this essay, I would suggest some critical approaches to the Gothic as debated by women writers who firstly employed this genre during the peak of production and circulation in England. They were actively involved into a larger discussion on the genesis and hybridisation of the Gothic, outlining its origin, aims, forms and language with the purpose of mapping the aesthetic principles of this form from their own points of view. In particular, I am referring to Clara Reeve, Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Ann Radcliffe, who were all successful authors but also sharp critics. Altogether the three writers advanced interesting theoretical ideologies of the Gothic. Published in 1785, Clara Reeve’s The Progress of Romance offers one of the first histories of prose fiction and the first straightforward attempt to elevate romance to the status of serious literature. In “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terrors” (1773), Anna Laetitia Barbauld describes Gothic fiction as the narrative which “awakens the mind, and keeps it on the stretch.” And Ann Radcliffe, who first announced a new age of Gothic romance, placed mystery at the centre of its thematic, rhetorical, and moral projection in her essay entitled “On the Supernatural in Poetry” (1826). The present essay thus aims to explore theoretical approaches to the Gothic, using the critical discussion promoted by Reeve, Barbauld and Radcliffe who deploy in dialogical ways the meanings of the Gothic with the aim to identify its aesthetic principles from a female point of view.