Access to the full content is only available to members of institutions that have purchased access. If you belong to such an institution, please log in or find out more about how to order.


Enlightenment Gothic and Terror Gothic


Clara Reeve appropriated central themes from a long tradition of English classical republicanism in a wide variety of fiction published over a long career. Quite conscious of the role enjoined on her by her politics, Reeve strove to create fiction that was consistently innovative formally, and that relentlessly addressed what Reeve saw as the major public issues of the last three decades of the eighteenth century – an age of revolution. Furthermore, she wrote the first comprehensive defence of her chosen mode of public instruction – the novel, or romance, including Gothic romance. In this ideological and cultural work, which she would have seen as ‘patriotic’ in the sense of ‘for the public interest’, she was also conscious of the social and cultural limits placed on her as a woman. She responded as other women writers of her time did, by turning such limits into opportunities and advantages. In particular, she practised and defended the literary discourse at that time powerfully, and usually negatively, associated with women as readers and writers – romance. She did all this while having to support herself from her writing. One of her novels, The Old English Baron (1778), first published as The Champion of Virtue (1777), remained a popular classic for a century, and her work of literary history, The Progress of Romance (1785), was the most comprehensive such work by a woman in English until the Victorian age. She was also an ambitious and experimental poet; she practised the prose romance as political allegory for the times; she developed the theory and practice of historical fiction, for adults and children, as an education in national identity; and she developed the novel of upper middle-class domestic life and realism in order to educate her readers as citizens of a modern state and world power.

Volume Contents

  • content locked
    Front Matter
  • content locked
    Introduction By Gary Kelly
  • content locked
    Clara Reeve, The Champion of Virtue (1777) By Clara Reeve
    • content locked
      Address to the Reader.
    • content locked
      The Champion of Virtue : A Gothic Story
  • content locked
    Mary Butt, The Traditions (1795) By Mary Butt
    • content locked
      To Mr. St. Quentin.
    • content locked
      I
      [Volume I]: Chapter I
    • content locked
      II
      Chapter II
    • content locked
      III
      Chapter III
    • content locked
      IV
      Chapter IV
    • content locked
      V
      Chapter V
    • content locked
      VI
      Chapter VI
    • content locked
      VII
      Chapter VII
    • content locked
      VIII
      Chapter VIII
    • content locked
      IX
      Chapter IX
    • content locked
      X
      Chapter X
    • content locked
      XI
      Chapter XI
    • content locked
      XII
      Chapter XII
    • content locked
      XIII
      Chapter XIII
    • content locked
      XIV
      Chapter XIV
    • content locked
      XV
      Chapter XV
    • content locked
      XVI
      Chapter XVI
    • content locked
      XVII
      [Volume II]: Chapter XVII
    • content locked
      XVIII
      Chapter XVIII
    • content locked
      XIX
      Chapter XIX
    • content locked
      XX
      Chapter XX
    • content locked
      XXI
      Chapter XXI
    • content locked
      XXII
      Chapter XXII
    • content locked
      XXIII
      Chapter XXIII
    • content locked
      XXIV
      Chapter XXIV
    • content locked
      XXV
      Chapter XXV
    • content locked
      XXVI
      Chapter XXVI
    • content locked
      XXVII
      Chapter XXVII
    • content locked
      XXVIII
      Chapter XXVIII
    • content locked
      XXIX
      Chapter XXIX
    • content locked
      XXX
      Chapter XXX
    • content locked
      XXXI
      Chapter XXXI
    • content locked
      XXXII
      Chapter XXXII
    • content locked
      XXXIII
      Chapter XXXIII
    • content locked
      XXXIV
      Chapter XXXIV
  • content locked
    Back Matter