A Forgotten Enchantment: The Silenced Princess, the Andalusian Warlord, and the Rescued Conclusion of “Sir Bertrand”

This essay addresses the authorship and complicated history of “Sir Bertrand: A Fragment,” the seminal Gothic short story often attributed to Anna Laetitia Barbauld. I acknowledge the existence of a completed “B-Text” of that fragment, which survives in an obscure anthology titled Gothic Stories (1797). The existence of a cohesive conclusion to this text, a work normally discussed only as “a fragment” and correspondingly tied to theoretical discussions of the Gothic as a genre of fragmentation, underscores the need for a critical re-evaluation of “Sir Bertrand” as both fragment and completed tale, and a new understanding of its role in the development of Gothic and supernatural fiction. I confront the problem of authorship and analyze the literary descent of both texts, and then I interrogate the “lost” conclusion not only to determine its impact on the tale’s narrative style and genre, but also to retrace its newly revealed historical roots in order to uncover a potential historical source for the rediscovered B-text.