Charlotte Dacre: The Passions

Description

Countess Appollonia Zulmer – beautiful, rich, and popular – can have any man she wants, at least until she meets Count Wiemar. Interested only in submissive, uneducated and unworldly women, Wiemar rejects Appollonia in favour of Julia, a simple woman whose primary joy in life is to obey her husband’s will. Despondent and then furious, Appollonia vows revenge, becoming Julia’s intimate confidante, opening her eyes to the limitations of patriarchy, and convincing her that her growing feelings for Count Darlowitz, Wiemar’s best friend, are no crime.

An epistolary novel about the destructive power of emotion, The Passions offers new insights into early feminism, romantic understandings of emotion and the sublime, and early nineteenth-century religious debates. It is an engrossing, powerful work of nineteenth-century literature, featuring one of the most memorable female villains of all time. Available to modern audiences for the first time, The Passions will engross literary scholars and casual readers alike.

Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
Silent Changes
The Passions
Volume I
Volume II
Volume III
Volume IV
Notes

Sujets

• L
• Four
• Charlotte
• 1811
• Part
• 4 (number)
• Charlotte, North Carolina
• Romanticism
• Passions
• Jennifer
• Novel
• Gothic
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: University of Wales Press
• Date de parution: 15 mai 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786839633
• Langue: English

Extrait

Gothic Originals
Gothic Originals

Published so far
Charlotte Dacre, The Passions (1811), edited by Jennifer Airey
In preparation
Elizabeth Gunning, The Foresters. A Novel (1796), edited by Valerie Grace Derbyshire
The Female Vampire in Hispanic Fiction , edited by Megan DeVirgilis
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The Factory Girl (1863), edited by Bridget Marshall
Dion Boucicault, The Vampire (1852) and The Phantom (1856), edited by Gary Rhoades and Matthew Knight
Washington Allston, Monaldi: A Tale (1841), edited by Kerry Dean Carso
Gothic Originals

 
 
 
C HARLOTTE D ACRE
The Passions
(1811)
Gothic Originals

With full introductions and explanatory notes to the text, Gothic Originals consists of scholarly editions aimed at readers, teachers and students of the gothic. Each text is a definitive scholarly edition, edited by an expert in their field. The series consists of texts from the eighteenth century onwards, and includes hidden classics to forgotten anthologies of terror. The series is an essential collection for any serious scholar of the gothic.
General Editor
Anthony Mandal, Cardiff University
Series Editor
Andrew Smith, University of Sheffield
Editorial Board
Carol Margaret Davison, University of Windsor
Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona
Marie Mulvey-Roberts, University of the West of England
Franz Potter, National University
Laurence Talairach, University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès
Dale Townshend, Manchester Metropolitan University
Lisa Vargo, University of Saskatchewan
Angela Wright, University of Sheffield
C HARLOTTE D ACRE

The Passions. In Four Volumes
edited by Jennifer L. Airey
© Jennifer L. Airey, 2023
Typeset in Minion 3 and SchwarzKopf New at the Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research, Cardiff University.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff cf10 4up.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library CIP Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78683-961-9 (hardback)
978-1-78683-962-6 ( EPDF )
978-1-78683-963-3 ( EPUB )
The right of Jennifer L. Airey to be identified as Editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Cover image: © Zoonar GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo
Contents

Introduction
Biography
Dacre and Early Feminism
Epistolarity, ‘La nouvelle Héloïse’ and the Problem of the Female Reader
Religion, Atheism and ‘The Passions’
Romanticism and Ruins
Madness and the Gothic Sublime
Select Bibliography
Note on the Text
THE PASSIONS
Volume I
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Volume III
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Volume IV
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Conclusion
Emendation List
End-of-Line Hyphens
Explanatory Notes
Introduction

S INCE ITS RECOVERY by feminist scholars in the 1990s, Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1806) has become a staple of the gothic curriculum. With its graphic scenes of violence and wholehearted embrace of the supernatural, the novel defies the model of women’s gothic writing made famous by authors such as Ann Radcliffe. To date, however, Dacre’s other novels— Confessions of the Nun of St Omer (1805), The Libertine (1807) and The Passions (1811)—have received significantly less critical attention, and of these works, only Nun of St Omer has been released in a modern edition.
The time has therefore come for a new edition of The Passions, Dacre’s last novel, and in some ways, her most interesting work. In its depiction of Appollonia Zulmer, The Passions offers a portrait of female treachery to rival that of any gothic villain. The text also deepens our understanding of early nineteenth-century gender roles, including a critical meditation on early feminism and the restrictions of patriarchy. It offers important insight into early nineteenth-century religious controversies: the novel questions what it means to be an atheist and promotes the power of free will, even in despair. It also offers a new perspective on the growth of Romanticism; even as Dacre’s characters experience a full range of deep, overpowering, sublime emotions, the novel champions Enlightenment rationality over sensibility or Romanticism. The Passions therefore provides an important perspective on Romanticism as a movement, reflecting one of the many ways in which long-ignored women’s writings, as well as so-called low art texts, complicate our understanding of a given literary moment. More impressionistically, the novel is also an excellent read; it is an engrossing, powerful work of nineteenth-century literature, featuring one of the most memorable female villains of all time.
BIOGRAPHY
Charlotte Dacre, née Charlotte King, was born c. 1772, the younger daughter of infamous Jewish moneylender John King, and his wife Sara. 1 In 1784, King divorced his wife under Jewish law and moved in with Jane Isabella Butler, the widowed Countess of Lanesborough, whom he married in 1790. King was a notorious figure: born Jacob Rey c. 1753, he attended the Charity School of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews before serving as an apprentice to a Jewish merchant and later as a clerk to an attorney. Early in life, he changed his name to John King in what Todd M. Endelman has called a ‘self-conscious move to de-emphasize his Jewish background’, 2 and by the age of 21, he had established himself as a ‘money-broker, that is, a middleman who negotiated loans for others, taking a fee for himself’. 3 King was known for his unscrupulous business dealings with high-profile clients, including the prophetess Joanna Southcott and the young actress Mary Robinson. He was also known for his affairs and illegitimate children, a reputation he encouraged. In 1781, he published his private correspondence with Robinson as Letters from Perdita to a Certain Israelite, and his Answers to Them , likely in a fit of anger when their flirtatious correspondence resulted neither in an affair nor in the return of the money that she and her husband had borrowed from him.
Throughout the 1780s, King also became known for his reformist politics. In 1783, he published Thoughts on the Difficulties and Distresses in Which the Peace of 1783, Has Involved the People of England, in which he criticized the government’s trade policies. Later, under pressure from the government, he turned away from political radicalism and began to re-embrace his Jewish heritage. Although he never formally converted to Christianity, he testified before the Court of King’s Bench in 1795 that ‘he had considered himself a member of the Church of England since he had been old enough to judge such matters for himself’. 4 By 1798, however, he was defending Judaism in print, and by 1812, he had re-established ties with the Mahamad of Sephardi congregation in London. He also wrote an introduction to David Levi’s Dissertations on the Prophecies of the Old Testament (1817) in which he proclaimed the Jews as God’s chosen people. That same year, he moved to Florence with the Countess of Lanesborough, where he died in 1823.
Charlotte Dacre therefore grew up a cultural outsider and the daughter of a man who abandoned his patriarchal responsibility to his family. He offered no financial support to his ex-wife, Dacre’s mother, and made no provisions to ensure the health and safety of his children. Consequently, Dacre’s work is marked both by a yearning for and an anger at her father for his betrayal. She reached out to her father in her first publication, the 1798 Trifles of Helicon coauthored with her sister, Sophia, when she signed the dedication from ‘Your affectionate daughters’. 5 Yet each of her four novels depicts in the strongest possible terms the destructive consequences of marital infidelity. The life of Cazire, heroine of Nun of St Omer, is fundamentally shattered, for instance, when her father leaves her mother for the evil Countess of Rosendorf, forcing Cazire into a nunnery and exposing her to the seductions of the married libertine Fribourg. The Libertine ’s Angelo likewise devastates his children when he leaves the virtuous Gabrielle for the evil Milborough, while the adulterous wives of Zofloya and The Passions destroy their families, their children and themselves when they stray from