Varieties of Female Gothic (review)

What is "Gothic"? After more than a decade of intensive critical activity on the topic, and many attempts at a comprehensive definition, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Gothic is essentially a portmanteau term, a flag of convenience. Once it was a means of dismissal. Now that Gothic is fashionable, the label provides a commercially viable cover for the publication of swathes of fiction that lie outside the traditional critical narrative of the rise of the novel. Gary Kelly's collection Varieties of Female Gothic represents this tendency. The suggestion of "varieties" entices, and seems to meet the demand for an expanded and diversified text base for research on the genre. But this get-out clause for the editor allows him to smuggle in an eclectic collection of texts under the pretext of subcategories such as Erotic Gothic, Historical Gothic, or Orientalist Gothic, while depending on a notion of the Gothic that often appears glib. On one page of the introduction to Sydney Owenson's The Missionary , for instance, Kelly describes the main protagonists as "sheltering in a vast temple of Gothic obscurity" and crossing "a desert landscape of excellently Gothic horror" (6:xiii), lazy epithets that obscure the novel's real argument with best-sellers such as Lewis's The Monk . Similarly, in 400 pages of editorial comment, a feast of biographical information and tendentious cultural and political analysis, the term "Female Gothic" is not much evolved from the vagueness of Ellen Moers's coinage: essentially, Gothic fiction written by women; or, at its most precise, "a species of Gothic fiction from the decades just before and after 1800, written by women, featuring female protagonists in certain situations, with appropriate settings, descriptions and plots, using distinctive kinds of narrations, and with distinctively feminine and feminist interests and tendencies, specific to that time, but of continuing interest to women and feminists now" (1:xiv). This gloss fails to describe most of the literature on offer here. The choice of title for this collection is, then, pragmatic. Kelly's sleight of hand would be welcome, however, if it were bringing to the fore neglected works of intrinsic merit or ones that reveal something vitally new about the production of fiction in this era.

Along with the growth in criticism of Gothic, a feature of recent years has been the rapid production of new paperback editions of Gothic and female-authored works of this period. Varieties of Female Gothic is a product of this phenomenon but also suffers from it. The first victim is Clara Reeve's The Old English Baron (1778). In the gap between conception and the realization of the Pickering & Chatto series, the Oxford World's Classics reissued this work with a new introduction by James Watts. Kelly made the decision to use the text of the first edition of 1777, published by a local Colchester bookseller, with its original title The Champion of Virtue and its more irregular and informal punctuation. In his "Note on the Text," he makes considerable play with Reeve's "textual re-fashioning" once her modest effort had been picked up by a London publisher. But no substantial changes were made to the narrative itself, and the response to the question "Do we really need a scholarly edition of Clara Reeve's novel with punctuation that was superannuated in its own time?" must surely be no. That said, Kelly's introduction is a useful survey of the author's career, building on his work in the earlier Bluestocking Feminism series (1999), and his DNB article on Reeve. He is even more thorough on the life and work of Mary Butt, better known as Mrs Sherwood, whose juvenile work The Traditions accompanies Reeve's novel in volume 1. Butt was no teenaged prodigy of Gothic in the manner of Matthew Lewis or Charlotte Dacre, however. The Traditions (1795), ludicrously mechanical and mercifully short, is a very poor relation of The Recess by Sophia Lee. What was the rationale for including...