Abstract
Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent was published in 1800 and Eaton Stannard Barrett’s The Heroine in 1813, that is, after the Gothic novel had peaked in terms of its popularity during the 1790s and before those better-known parodies of Gothic fiction, Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey and Austen’s Northanger Abbey, which were published in 1818.1 Whereas The Heroine is a clear parody of the conventions of the popular Gothic novel, Castle Rackrent is perhaps a more subtle parody of the Gothic mode. Both Edgeworth and Barrett were commended by Austen, who wrote in a letter dated 2 March 1814: ‘I finished The Heroine last night and was very much amused by it … It diverted me exceedingly … I have torn through the third volume… I do not think it falls off. It is a delightful burlesque particularly on the Radcliffe style.’2 Belinda, Maria Edgeworth’s novel published in 1801, is of course linked with Fanny Burney’s Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796) in Austen’s Northanger Abbey as one of those works ‘in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language’.3
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Notes
The Letters of Jane Austen, ed. R.W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 376–377.
Cited in extract from Maurice Lévy, Le Roman ‘Gothique’ Anglaise 1764–1824 (Toulouse: Universite de Toulouse, 1968) as it appears in Romantic Reassessment, Vol. 3: ‘Collateral Gothic 1’, ed. Thomas Meade Harwell (Salzburg: Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 1986), p. 178.
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 58.
The manuscript of The Black Book of Edgeworthstown is held by the National Library of Ireland in Dublin. As Kathryn Kirkpatrick notes, selected passages from this manuscript have been published in Harriet Jessie Butler’s and Harold Edgeworth Butler’s The Black Book of Edgeworthstown and Other Edgeworth Memories, 1585–1817 (London: Faber & Faber, 1927), ‘“Going to Law about that Jointure”: Women and property in Castle Rackrent’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 22, 1 (1996), p. 28.
See, for example, Kathryn Kirkpatrick, ‘“Going to Law about that Jointure”: Women and Property in Castle Rackrent’, p. 21 and Marilyn Butler, ‘Edgeworth’s Ireland: History, Popular Culture, and Secret Codes’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 4, 2 (2001), p. 271 for parallels between history and fiction in this respect.
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, in Peter Fairclough (ed.), Three Gothic Novels (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 39.
Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent and Ennui ed. Marilyn Butler (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 62. All page references, which will appear hereafter in the text, are to this edition.
Brian Hollingworth, Maria Edgeworth’s Irish Writing: Language, History, Politics (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 82.
There is, however, a serious point behind this joke. The Bog Reclamation Act of 1771 was one of several measures taken to enable the proliferation of various kinds of leases in the eighteenth century: ‘Tenants in tail were given powers of leasing for three lives or 41 years by a statue of Charles I; other leasing powers were conferred by special legislation to encourage public works, such as building places of worship, schools, corn mills, prisons, for mining purposes and bog reclamation.’ J.C.W. Wylie, Irish Land Law (Abingdon, Oxon: Professional Books Ltd, 1975), p. 22.
E.J. Clery, introduction to The Castle of Otranto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. xxxii.
See Michael Neill, ‘Mantles, Quirks, and Irish Bulls’, pp. 79–81 and Susan Glover, ‘Glossing the Unvarnished Tale: Contra-dicting Possession in Castle Rackrent’, Studies in Philology 99, 3 (2002), pp. 299–300 for brief and helpful overviews of the disparate critical readings of Thady.
Eaton Stannard Barrett, The Heroine ed. Walter Raleigh (London: Henry Frowde, 1909), p. xi. All page numbers, which will appear hereafter in the text, are from this edition.
For an example of the latter kind of reading, see Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 1.
E.J. Clery and Robert Miles (eds), Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 204.
Cited in Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England: Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration and Residuary Influences (1957; Metuchen, New Jersey and London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1987), p. 181.
Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote or the Adventures of Arabella, edited by Margaret Dalziel and introduced by Margaret Anne Doody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. xi.
Duncan Isles, ‘Johnson and Charlotte Lennox’, The New Rambler, June 1967, pp. 41–42, cited in the Oxford World’s Classics 1989 edition of The Female Quixote, p. 420.
Walter Raleigh, introduction to The Heroine ed. Eaton Stannard Barrett (London: Henry Frowde, 1909), pp. iii–iv.
Paul Lewis, ‘Gothic and Mock Gothic: The Repudiation of Fantasy in Barrett’s Heroine’, English Language Notes 21, 1 (September, 1983), p. 45.
Gary Kelly, ‘“Unbecoming a Heroine”: Novel Reading, Romanticism, and Barrett’s The Heroine’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 45, 2 (September 1990), p. 221.
Jacqueline Howard, Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 155.
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 26.
Glen Cavaliero, The Alchemy of Laughter: Comedy in English Fiction (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 60.
Jonathan Lamb, ‘The Comic Sublime and Sterne’s Fiction’ in Richard Kroll (ed.), The English Novel: Smollett to Austen (London and New York: Longman, 1998), p. 148.
See Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).
See Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), especially Chapter 2.
Daniel Cottom, The Civilized Imagination: A Study of Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and Sir Walter Scott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
See Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660–1833 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 163–164, 170–175.
J.A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England 1550–1750 (London: Longman, 1984), p. 145.
Nicola J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–1825: Intercepted Letter Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 112 as cited in Jacqueline Belanger, ‘Some Preliminary Remarks on the Production and Reception of Fiction Relating to Ireland, 1800–1829’, Reading the Romantic Text Vol. IV, No. 2 (www.cf.ac.uk/ncap/corvey/articles/cc04).
Edmund Burke, Letter to a Noble Lord in The Works of Edmund Burke (Michigan: Scholarly Press, 1965) Vol. V, p. 187. Cited in Sue Chaplin, ‘Speaking of Dread: The Law, Sensibility and the Sublime in Eighteenth-Century Fiction’; doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Salford, 2001, p. 51.
Susan Moller Okin, ‘Women and the Making of the Sentimental Family’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 11 (1982), p. 72
cited in Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660–1833 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 226.
Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, World’s Classics edition 1989, p. xxvii.
Leslie J. Moran, ‘Law and the Gothic Imagination’ in Fred Botting (ed.), The Gothic (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001), p. 87.
See Alison Milbank’s entry on ‘The Sublime’ in Marie Mulvey-Roberts (ed.), The Handbook to Gothic Literature (London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 226–232 for a brief and helpful overview of the sublime in literature and in theory.
Gary Dyer, British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–1832 (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, 23) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Margaret Rose begins her extensive 1993 study with the following words: ‘When I first published on parody some twenty years ago now it was still being treated by many critics as a rather lowly comic form which had been of little real significance in the history of literature or of other arts’ (Margaret Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern and Post-Modern [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], p. 1).
Thomas A. Schmid, Humour and Transgression in Peacock, Shelley, and Byron: A Cold Carnival (Lampeter: Edwin Meilen Press, 1991), p. 30.
Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 156, 157.
Robert Phiddian, Swift’s Parody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 13–14,
as cited in Simon Dentith, Parody (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 15–16.
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© 2005 Avril M. Horner and Susan H. Zlosnik
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Horner, A., Zlosnik, S. (2005). The Late Romantic Turn. In: Gothic and the Comic Turn. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230503076_2
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