Beyond the Radcliffe Formula: Isabella Kelly and the Gothic Troubles of the Married Heroine

Imitation, Intertextuality and the Minerva Press Novel

“…The extent to which any early 1790s novels should be seen as 'imitative' of Radcliffe's work is currently being challenged by scholars including Yael Shapira, who points to the significant divergences from Radcliffe in the novels of Minerva authors like Isabella Kelly and, in forthcoming work, reconsiders Radcliffe's place in gothic chronology. 13 In this essay, I take a different approach to the idea of imitation-and, indeed, to the idea of 'the gothic'. I am less concerned with the genealogy or definition of genre-who published what first; how gothic is the gothic?-than with the explicit and implicit ways that the novels I analyse do function as (by my definition) imitations.…”