Introduction: Fantastic Forms of Change

Was there ever a “Female Gothic”?

“…Women-authored texts that do not feature "Female Gothic" tropes-a distressed heroine, domestic incarceration, threats of sexual violence, anxiety about monstrous or absent mothers-are often given little critical attention. As I and others have argued elsewhere, however, women's early Gothic writinga great deal of which is only accessible to us because of the recovery work of feminist scholars-is much more aesthetically, politically, thematically, and generically diverse than the Female Gothic categorization suggests (Kelly, 2003, Wright, 2003, Potter, 2005, Coykendall, 2005, Ledoux, 2013.…”

“…However, since her work is ideologically conservative, establishing what James Watt calls the "loyalist gothic" (Watt, 1999), feminist critics often exclude her novel The Old English Baron (1778) and her important literary criticism The Progress of Romance (1785) from work on the Female Gothic even though both have been seminal to the development of a women's literary tradition. On the other side of the spectrum, Sarah Wilkinson's chapbook "The Count of Montabino" (c. 1810) forms a workingclass critique of the bourgeois domestic entrapment theme so central to the Radcliffean narrative (Ledoux, 2013). Although Wilkinson was a prolific author who enjoyed consumer name recognition, her work in "pulp fiction" has been virtually ignored in part because it does not promote women's writing as high art.…”