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This Element argues for the value of biography in studying trade Gothic – that is, Gothic novels published by unprestigious trade publishers during the Romantic period. As Section 1 argues, biography has been central to the study of canonical Gothic and, indeed, to the very formation of the Gothic canon, whereas the biographical obscurity of trade novelists has reinforced the marginalization of their works. The following sections draw on the case of Isabella Kelly (c. 1759–1857) to show how biographical knowledge can provide insight into seemingly formulaic Gothic novels. Section 2 uses new archival findings to offer an updated biography of Kelly, while Section 3 traces covert pieces of life writing embedded in her fiction. Section 4 focuses on Kelly's acquaintance with Matthew Lewis, drawing on her fiction to offer a speculative reassessment of their relationship and to question assumptions about the flow of influence in the Gothic literary marketplace.
Though numerous Gothic novels appeared in Romantic-era Britain, critics have tended to focus on the works of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory Lewis, largely ignoring the Gothic output of trade publishing houses such as the Minerva Press. Using the work of Eliza Parsons, Francis Lathom and Isabella Kelly, this chapter argues that the division of Romantic-era Gothics into worthwhile ‘originals’ and uninteresting ‘imitations’ misses the complex intertextuality that characterised Gothic fiction at this formative moment. First,the chapter challenges scholarship’s traditional ‘trickle-down’ model of influence by considering Parsons’s The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) alongside Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790): their shared plotline not only defies expectation by demonstrating Parsons’s independence, but raises the possibility that Radcliffe was responding to the lesser-known fictions published in her day. Second, it questions the sufficiency of the term ‘imitation’ by looking at the creative and subversive uses to which Kelly’s Eva (1799) and Lathom’s The Midnight Bell (1798) put the figure of the Bleeding Nun, an element from Lewis’s The Monk (1796).
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