[In the following essay, MacKenzie discusses Radcliffe's Gothic style and its effects on the eighteenth-century public mind.]

Many trips to Scotland are undoubtedly projected and executed, and many unfortunate connections formed, from the influence which novels gain over the mind.

—Catherine MacAulay, Letters on Education

I. THE SCENE OF READING

During much the same period that the French Revolution horrified the public imagination of England, the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe terrified English private imaginations. As Edmund Burke and others fought Jacobin sentiments (and lack of sentiment) in the political theater, Radcliffe claimed an altogether easier conquest of the hearth. Her novels are Gothic—really the apogee of the form's early ascendancy—but they are also domestic; home is ever-present, ever-discussed, ever-sought. Home is also the cover to which Radcliffe's obscure life in letters has generally been critically consigned. Bonamy Dobree's introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition of The Mysteries of Udolpho says simply, “she never entered the literary life, preferring to live quietly at home, writing by the fireside, not enjoying very good health.”¹ The scene described is a commonplace, a default visioning of the publicly invisible domesticity Radcliffe herself helped invent.² Aline Grant, in her 1951 biography, feels licensed to embroider, as it were: “waiting for William's return in these long evening hours, with all her household duties done and complete freedom from interruption assured, Ann began beguiling the time with putting down on paper some of the romantic scenes on which her imagination loved to dwell.”³

Grant and Dobree are heirs to the critical tradition which has identified, in uncritical fashion, both the Gothic and domestic strands of later-eighteenth-century novel discourse with a sphere of English public life separated from the realm of politics and enclosed upon a gendered bourgeois privacy. Gothic fiction was representative of the coincidence between feminized, formally chaotic fantasy and the woman's world of domesticity which lacked most kinds of classical formal unity or structure save the boundaries which sealed it off from the masculine territories of commercial and political endeavor. Gothic art (especially Radcliffean “women's Gothic fiction”) and the private home shared the distinction of definition by negation. Reading Radcliffe has forever been an exegesis of domesticity, registering the tremors from across the channel as faintly felt behind closed doors. She has been given custody of the flip side of public life during the revolution decade.⁴ And, of course, Gothic fiction and private domesticity shared not just a homology in the rhetorics of their respective ideologues, but often enough the ideologues themselves, whose numbers include Maria Edgeworth, Catherine MacAulay, Elizabeth Montagu, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mary Wollstonecraft and, I hope to demonstrate, Ann Radcliffe.

Within the carefully patrolled—though not hermetically sealed—confines of discussions on Gothic fiction, domesticity, education, sentiment and other feminized topoi, a politics was assembled whose voices were no less published and circulated than those speaking on matters germane to public politics. In truth, the development of middle-class domesticity was constitutive of political discourse, and productive of oppositions within political discourse. Domesticity remains, nonetheless, definitionally outside the national political sphere. Harriet Guest speaks of a “redefinition of the boundaries between public and private, to describe the opposition between the public and commercial world outside and the domestic sphere it is imagined to enclose, so that the power of private and commercial wealth gains an audible voice in the real, manly world of politics.”⁵ Home, on the other hand, is not in the same way constrained, because a collateral shift in the structures of British nationality at the end of the eighteenth century brought about a more directly instrumental identification between home in its private bourgeois practice and in its national guise. Such is indicated by the twist in the etymology of the word “home” which occurred late in the eighteenth century, enabling it to mean not just a country of nativity or residence, but England above all other countries. Native English speakers not native to England practiced this semantic finesse right across the arc of Empire; the 1892 Australian National Dictionary features this exemplum of “home”: “All good Australians hope to go to England when they die. Not only does everybody, now-a-days, go ‘home’ when able to do so, but many stay there.”⁶

The later eighteenth century is also the period in which the first English-speaking nation that was not England began making claims on the word “home” as a national honorific. Thomas Paine fell to battle with Edmund Burke over the proper means by which domestic and familial relations could be used to figure socio-political relations.⁷ In 1782, the two Principal Secretaries of State were renamed the Home and Foreign Secretaries and a decade later the French Revolution became the occasion for unprecedented restriction of foreign entrance, residence, property, commerce and correspondence in England.⁸ The figural proximity of nation home and private home was resolutely fixed in Britain during the revolutionary decade and the Napoleonic wars, “a contest not for the ordinary objects of warfare, but for the salvation of all that is dear to Britons, of their ancient renown, their present rights, their social and domestic blessings, their very existence as a nation.”⁹ Home, in this sense, comes to circumscribe the sphere of classical politics, and private domesticity underpins a public figuration. That public figuration, in both Burke's and Paine's contrary visions, yokes private and public security and prosperity to one another.

In architectural theory and practice, the classicist “authority of the chaste design of universal truth” (Guest, p. 130) was also subject to circumscription by strains of Gothic art. James Malton, for instance, published fourteen designs for rural habitations in a “regular gradation, from a peasant's simple hut, to habitation worthy of a gentleman of fortune.”¹⁰ Richard Elsam complained, “would our English students, before they make the tour to Rome, bestow only a little pains to make themselves acquainted with these admirable [Gothic] relics, the treasure of their own country, it would certainly enable them to speak of it with pleasure abroad, and to practise it hereafter with better founded confidence at home” (p. 17). And John Wood, the architect associated with the great buildings of Bath, wrote of the “Delphick Temple in Greece; a temple, my lord, of British institution as I shall hereafter make appear to you by the most irrefragable circumstances.”¹¹ The continental tour, the Italian academies, and the prescriptivity of classicism were by no means abandoned, but the homeliness of native British Gothic art was being groomed, with the aid of picturesque tourism's love for the rough and broken, to adorn the home and seat of empire.

Private homes themselves were increasingly guardians of an immanent British cultural frame, and novelists were busy establishing their art form as the only possible medium through which living domesticity could be represented. It is not my intention here simply to turn the domesticity/politics schema inside out. Home does not occlude or smother political discourse, nor does the nascent angel of the household lay hands on the scepter of power. What Edmund Burke records as the simultaneous feminine beauty and masculine sublimity of the nation finds its best expression in the public figuration of home. It is a figuration that partakes of the figural logic David Hume applied to abstract thought: “abstract ideas are therefore in themselves individual, however they may become general in their representation. The image in our minds is only that of a particular object, the application of it in our reason be the same as if it were universal.”¹² The universal particularity of home provides a mechanism to transform authority into systemic surveillance and regulation, and to make a public totality of myriad private ambitions and sentiments.

To the particular cultural gravity accruing upon home, novels added a commerce, an economy of publication and dissemination within the non-public domestic sphere. Home is where Radcliffe's novels were created. Home was also their destination and a limit-site for their reception. Their passage through the literary marketplace and circulating libraries was simply the most economic route from the Ward Radcliffe fireside to other firesides and a reading constituency that was assumed to be female. Home surrounded the scene of female reading and writing, a scene repeated many times within Radcliffe's novels. It is this scene that will form the central trope of my essay. By way of defining it, I will refer to the work of an earlier artist: two paintings by Joseph Wright of Derby, both painted in the 1760s. The paintings are adaptations of a genre critics have deemed Candlelights (a scene illuminated by a single candle or comparably limited source of light) to scenes of women reading and writing.¹³ A number of Wright's works in that decade eschewed the specificity of portraits to depict scenes whose focus is domesticity rather than a named patron and family at home. This approach in itself was hardly brand new, but the kind of domesticity composed was. The light source at the heart of Wright's paintings is invariably concealed. As an actual center, the candle is a deferred presence. Both Benedict Nicolson and Ronald Paulson view these illuminating devices as a kind of secularized miracle, “a modern equivalent of the supernatural, a substitute or displacement for a nativity or some other transcendent event.”¹⁴ The home, in the midst of science and public economies, contains a transformative power which is not transparent to public knowledge, but authorizes it and gives impetus to its agency.

Wright actually painted four of the reading-women candlelights. Three of them have a young woman holding a letter which hides the candle she reads by. Each of these three women is also observed by a man. The fourth painting shows an older woman reading a letter, which may well be addressed, to the young woman who sits by. Such scenes are very familiar to readers of Radcliffe, and indeed of most domestic fiction writers from the eighteenth century. I am most interested by the two Wright paintings which were done for sale (the others are part of a set of four panels inset above doors in Radburne Hall): A Girl Reading a letter by Candlelight, with a Young Man peering over her shoulder and A Girl reading a letter, with an Old Man reading over her shoulder. In the former, the reader has written, “Dere Jack” at the head of a blank sheet that will presumably be her reply, and the latter also shows pen and paper at the ready. Of the commentaries I have read on these paintings, none suggests that there may be a phantasmatic, or perhaps broadly figural, aspect to the scenes depicted. Yet the reading girls do not show any sign of acknowledging the men who stand over and behind them. Transposed to a Radcliffe narrative, it would be almost impossible not to see the male watchers as at least partly phantasmatic—spectralized in Terry Castle's phrasing.¹⁵ Commentators agree that the letters and just-begun replies indicate that romantic correspondence is occupying the subjects' engrossed gazes. These connotations, together with the postulate of candle as secular miracle, lead me to read the paintings as allegorizing a paternalistic and heteroerotic surveillance that encloses the reading girls and even imperils them at the same time as it seems to license them. Wright's scenes are saturated by the genres of candlelight painting and romantic correspondence; the lower right corner of the earlier painting is occupied by a book open to its title page, “The Art or Guide of Writing a Letter.” This saturation then extends itself to meet the moment in patriarchal domesticity at which young women are evacuated as subjects by their value as exchangeable objects. The as-yet-blank replies, the translucence (and flammability) of the letters to the candles, the men's surveillance, and the girls' vulnerable positions all bespeak a permeability in young women. Because this permeability sets the stage for the possibility of seduction, it also dictates the possibility of violation. Confinement and pursuit are characteristic features of both sanctioned and perverse sexual bargaining. Hence this scene's other possibility, a legitimate love match, makes a well-lit scene of domesticity the counterpoint to the fraught, ambiguous gloom of Wright's scene of reading. The equivocal peril contrived by these paintings is, nonetheless, normative; it literalizes the crisis through which young women must pass in the exchange between father and husband, while also justifying the need for that exchange. Between the havens of paternal supervision and marital unity (modes of masculine presence which fulfill or seal up the single woman's permeability) comes a moment at which the structures of familial domesticity are obscured and paternalistic surveillance loses its coherence to ambivalence.

It is not inconsequential that these paintings are effectively fictions—which is to say without specific referents—because the interface they hint at between artistic genre and social economies owes much to novels.¹⁶ The gaps of signification here, of which the unseen text and unwritten responses are the most obvious, are places in which narrative is invoked. Though novelistic narrative does not intervene as such in the paintings, they must be understood as already shot through with the same structuring logics upon which text narratives are built. That there is no articulated story to the paintings is not important; the stories are written elsewhere and they meet actual marriage economies by means of genre, which establishes itself here as the token of marketability. I am suggesting that the paintings seek to operate in the sphere of commerce by captivating public viewership through a condensation of another kind of commercial practice—the marriage market—with aesthetic sensation. Artistic production, like architecture and tourism, serves its own commodification by simultaneously concealing and displaying the very processes in which it takes part.¹⁷ I will contend that novelistic narrative learns to perform the same kinds of condensations as the ones Wright's paintings emblematize.¹⁸ And more than condensation, the rhetorical core of Radcliffe's narratives has a profile that resembles money-based transaction. The Radcliffean transaction is one narrative for another.

II. FIRST AND SECOND READINGS

Ann Radcliffe crystallizes in her works a powerful addition to the technical repertoire of English novels. The technique for which I am giving her credit is a careful incorporation of lacunae: hidden and missing elements which both drive the narrative, and determine its overall shape. The Radcliffean narrative is one which deliberately sets up its first reading as qualitatively different from any subsequent re-readings. In effect, the impetus which carries a reading forward, calling the reader on to the end, is one explicitly based on revelations and clarifications. Cannon Schmitt, writing about The Italian, notes this: “the reader's position with regard to these hints replicates, in a mise en abime, that of the heroine herself: for the reader and heroine alike, each new bit of evidence, each new piece of suggestive information demands interpretive attention.”¹⁹ As Walter Scott puts it, Radcliffe taught novelists “to break off the narrative, when it seemed at the point of becoming most interesting—to extinguish a lamp just when a parchment containing some hideous secret ought to have been read—to exhibit shadowy forms and half-heard sounds of woe.”²⁰ In Radcliffe's most commercially successful novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, names, identities, proprieties of conduct, trajectories of desire, and relationships shift and change, are lost and concealed. All are crucial to the protagonist's negotiation of her perils and are also necessary to readerly recognition of development. A second or later reading is one which short-circuits the effects of Radcliffe's narrative by recognizing in advance who and what will fill the text's lacunae. Earlier practitioners of Gothic fiction had introduced the lacuna as a feature of the incomplete antique manuscripts which frame the authorial mask, “editor.” Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764), Clara Reeve's The Old English Baron (1777), Sophia Lee's The Recess (1785) and William Beckford's Vathek (1786) all submit themselves to their readers as narratives reconstructed from found and fragmented manuscripts. But none of these works develops the lacuna into a propulsive narrative tactic the way Radcliffe's novels do. I don't think Radcliffe's work prototypifies the novel of suspense in English so much as it adds a set of apparatus to fiction narrative which will later be commandeered by suspense fiction.

I likewise do not suggest that The Mysteries of Udolpho has anything resembling a surprise ending. In fact, it is remarkable how efficiently the mechanisms and conventions of marriage plot come to look, in this novel, like a kind of homing instinct. Tying marital knots is a compulsory ritual in Radcliffe resolutions, but the establishment of a happy home receives investment that consumes marriage. Home is, above all, the narrative's destination.²¹ Momentum is generated by collapsing and reforming genealogies and identities. Extrinsic identity, the naming of others, is given palpable influence over the form and integrity of the protagonist's subjectivity. Radcliffe's innovation is to synchronize her plotted lacunae, sometimes literal gaps in writing, sometimes figural gaps in knowledge, with the overall structure of the narrative and the self-realization of its heroine. Mysterious tunes, words, and figures, gaps in a manuscript, mistaken resemblances and so on, have equivalent spaces in the novel, spaces that will be filled in later, with direct consequences for its heroine, Emily St. Aubert. The blank pages and undefined identities seen in Wright of Derby's paintings are brought to the forefront and made dynamic. In a novel as long as The Mysteries of Udolpho, the explanations are intricate, to say the least. For instance, Agnes the dying nun whom Emily encounters after her flight from Udolpho Castle turns out to be Laurentini, the lover of the Marquis de Villeroi who had married and murdered the sister of Emily's father, St. Aubert, all of which serves to release Emily from the fear that she is an illegitimate product of adultery.

Radcliffe's deliberately fissured narrative style is important because of its capacity to accommodate nominally separate discursive spheres within its figural range. The spaces opened by her lacunae multiply the valences of the narrative so that political, national, and oppositional voices can be heard playing through it. What I am calling lacunae should not be understood as spaces that are simply empty. They are spaces which signify doubly and more than doubly. Pierre Macherey has this to say:

The mystery novel, as it is practised by Mrs Radcliffe, seems to be the product of two different movements: the one establishes the mystery while the other dispels it. The ambiguity of the narrative derives from the fact that these two movements are not, properly speaking successive … but are inextricably simultaneous.²²

At the same location—which is a location though it cannot actually be located—the text falls silent and confesses everything. Radcliffe's lacunae are always doubled. They are both gaps—epistemological blanks—and effervescences of too much meaning—providing multiple and unstable narrative possibilities. A missing or misplaced identity is an assurance that many identities are capable of occupying the space available. A recurrent device is the mysterious figure which hugs the shadows and vanishes without revealing either identity, or indeed earthly embodiment. Once in a while a lurking figure will be found; for example, “springing towards the bed, Emily discovered—Count Morano!” (Udolpho, p. 261). Morano is one of Emily's unwanted and improper suitors. His late-night visit to her bedroom is, needless to say, unwelcome, and demonstrates a dictate of Gothic propriety: those who are not who (or where) they ought to be, are not who they ought to be. While his conduct lies under suspicion, Emily's true love, Valancourt, is repeatedly troubled with the epithet, “he was no longer the same Valancourt” (p. 581). He becomes a lacuna: “Valancourt seemed to be annihilated, and her soul sickened at the blank that remained.”

The term aporia offers a partial alternative to my definition of lacuna. As a rhetorical figure marking hesitation and, more so in the French, a point of inarticulable contradiction, an aporia is what a lacuna opens when it calls a halt to the onward rush of narrative. Lacunae always make a metaphor of doubt about how to proceed, by pushing the interruption of reading against the spatio-temporal edict for forward movement. A lacuna is itself a non-figure which accommodates the intervention of figures, including aporias. Reading is suspended in a lacuna, its temporality is withdrawn and the scene of reading is hypostatized for a moment, like Wright of Derby's scenes, before writing or reading has taken place. Reading, however, goes on elsewhere and the echoes of other readings and other voices ring through Radcliffe's lacunae. The impossibility of signification in a non-signifying space is mingled with a space in which signification is unrestrained, undivided and unaddressed. Jacques Derrida finds such a polymodal discourse instigated by the aporia itself: “a plural logic of the aporia thus takes shape. It appears to be paradoxical enough so that the partitioning among multiple figures of aporia does not oppose figures to each other, but instead installs the haunting of the one figure in the other.”²³

The veiled-corpse encounter Emily has during her incarceration at Udolpho Castle is perhaps the most clear cut—not to say authorially intrusive—case in all of Radcliffe's novels of the strategic lacuna.²⁴ It does not have an immediately apparent effect on our understanding of Emily's genealogy. It does, however, speak very much to the relational dynamic (a dynamic of identifications) between author, heroine and reader which Radcliffe takes such care to build. It occurs, appropriately, when reading fails to divert Emily from thoughts of her misfortunes and she decides to explore the castle, particularly to look at the picture behind a veil which she had passed by earlier. It is, however, not a picture that the veil hides. Radcliffe leads us towards the unveiling:

[Emily] found herself somewhat agitated … the circumstance of the veil, throwing a mystery over the subject that excited a faint degree of terror. But a terror of this nature, as it occupies and expands the mind, and elevates it to high expectation, is purely sublime, and leads us, by a kind of fascination, to seek even the object, from which we appear to shrink.

(p. 248)²⁵

She writes here, as much about the reading impulses of her audience as about the trepidation of Emily. We walk in step with Emily, at once towards and away from that which will dissolve our subjective connection to her. The veil's secret is something which will break our sympathetic engagement and split us in two: a reader and a text, or a spectator and a spectacle. Radcliffe's appropriation of the first person plural is a momentary capture of the screen of subjectivity. We are, for want of a better word, interpellated by our reading. Our subjectivity is projected onto the page and made obedient to the narrative's structuring imperatives. The scene of reading is extended beyond the frame to present us to ourselves under the figural gaze of an agency, in command of the practice of reading, which exceeds us. And our access—even equivalence—to Emily's subjectivity will be momentarily objectified and taken away from us.

This dividing of reader from text takes place in the next paragraph, when Emily lifts the veil, “but instantly let it fall—perceiving that what it has concealed was no picture, and, before she could leave the chamber, she dropped senseless to the floor” (p. 249). The object behind the veil cannot be screened. It does not behave like an object at all: it cannot be represented, but nor can it be set aside. Instead, it deprives Emily of consciousness altogether. Her recovery depends on a willful forgetting or dropping of the veil within herself: at dinner the next day, “the horror of the chamber rushed on her mind. Several times … she feared, that illness would betray her emotions, and compel her to leave the room; but the strength of her resolution remedied the weakness of her frame.” She is resisting a spectacularization of herself. There is no question of Emily portraying the horrifying sight behind the veil for others. All she can do is fortify herself against waves of assailing affect. And as Radcliffe breaches the decorum of her narrative's apparent omniscience to conceal what is seen from the reader, she seems to confirm the figurative priority of Emily's subjectivity over the reader's own. Readers share the perils and benefits of the scene of reading with Emily to an extent that is carefully controlled and patrolled.

Of course, privileged access to Emily's consciousness does not actually subsume her status as, at all times, a spectacle in the novel. But the purpose of a gesture such as the unrepresentable sight is to assure us that to some degree Emily's imaginative relationship to her milieu overrules our own. Although we are never in danger of being literally exposed as spectacles to the text's spectator, the “circumstance of the veil” is a revelation that, in the moment of exposure to the horrific, we are as vulnerable to loss of self as she is. Opening the veil allows Radcliffe to catch us in an instant of not being ourselves. Our imitation of Emily's consciousness exposes us to the danger of self-loss. We are made suddenly aware that the text is an object that we treat as a subject with a kind of ontological priority over ourselves. In the act of reading we are only subjects at its behest, other to its command of imaginative investment, and specimens of the object-ness of the word “reader.”²⁶ Derrida, speaking again of aporias, says “we are exposed … in our absolute and absolutely naked uniqueness, that is to say, disarmed, delivered to the other, incapable even of sheltering ourselves behind what could still protect the interiority of a secret” (p. 12). In another sense we are serialized and generified, made to seem a homology for every other reader in every other home, always haunted by a phantasmatic onlooker who has a paternalistic interest in what we read.

Even as she steps into the narrative to withhold from us its most powerful affective encounter, Radcliffe makes certain that we will retain that encounter and look for signposts to lead us back to the veiled recess. This promised return is the lacuna's current operating within the text. The second reading is an unveiling of the first reading. It is very close to the end of the novel when Radcliffe finally deals with the rent Emily's sighting has torn in the narrative. The solution to this problem is not simply a subsequent filling-in of the gap, because this, like other lacunae, is not an empty space. Emily does not get up pluck enough to revisit the sight. Instead, it is disinvested of its horror by a confinement to mere representation:

Emily, it may be recollected, had, after the first glance, let the veil drop, and her terror had prevented her from ever after provoking a renewal of such suffering. Had she dared to look again, her delusion and her fears would have vanished together, and she would have perceived that the figure before her was not human, but formed of wax.

(Udolpho, p. 662)

In effect, we read a re-reading. This re-reading draws audience and heroine back together; “on such an object, it will readily be believed, … no person could endure to look twice” (p. 662). The re-reading proves that the first reading was misinformed. Rather than re-reading, it might as well be called a re-writing. Like some kind of vanishing ink, the narrative has outlined, erased and reinscribed a portion of itself. And our investment of readerly interest, even labor (if the implications of serial readership are given full play)²⁷ has generated surplus value in the form of a second narrative free of charge.

A first reading in Radcliffe is not only affectively, but also congnitively different from later readings. The sense that a first reading might have a particular structural difference from later readings seems characteristic of the responses to novels generated in the literary debates of the late eighteenth century. Maria Edgeworth, in her Letters for Literary Ladies, writes, “Is there any pathetic writer in the world who could move you as much at the ‘twentieth reading’ as at the first? … do not let life become as tedious as a twice told tale.”²⁸ Prior literary forms, it will be assumed, were not bound by such restrictions. Frances Burney, for instance, deprecates her own novel, The Wanderer, when her protagonist pauses from her peregrinations to kill a little time with a volume of The Guardian and finds, “in the lively instruction, the chaste morality, and the exquisite humor of Addison, an enjoyment no repetition can cloy.”²⁹ The conciliatory tone Walter Scott adopts towards Radcliffe in his “Prefatory Memoir” has a limited scope: “when some inadequate cause is assigned for a strong emotion; the reader feels tricked, and like a child who has seen the scenes of a theatre too nearly, the idea of paste-board, cords and pullies, destroys for ever the illusion with which they were first seen from the proper point of view” (qtd. in Rogers, p. 123). Scott is indeed an adherent to the first reading school, asserting, “the interest terminates on the first reading of [Radcliffe's] volumes, and cannot, so far as it rests upon a high degree of excitation, be recalled upon a second perusal” (qtd. in Rogers, p. 122). Although these are the grounds upon which Radcliffe's art was condemned by her early-nineteenth-century detractors, there is no doubt she makes a virtue of these and other perceived betrayals of the novelist's craft.

The second reading—that which is provided in the novel's resolving chapters—introduces stable subjectivity, but does it by sorting through the extra-subjective clauses in the heroine's contract with sociality. The specifically textual lacunae are erased so the heroine may be a lacuna only unto herself. The full coherence of her subjectivity is not made present to us; that is the limit which ends narrative, the closure into which the novel vanishes. Such is the contract that we make with the novel. Lacunae are the principle which has allowed us participation in the heroine's consciousness. Reader meets heroine at the scene of reading. Both are occupied with the task of sorting through questions which will determine not just who the heroine is, but on what grounds she will function as a subject. In general terms the reader can be said to have genre as a guide to this process; for the heroine, something more like the proprieties of the marriage market are her guide. In either case narrative drive is towards the point at which narrative itself becomes superfluous. The external and internal conditions of reading the novel, like the external and internal conditions of the heroine's subjectivity, can only be separated at the moment the novel is put down. As long as we participate in the narrative we are always figures of the novel's readerly economies as much as the novel is the apparatus of our readerly pleasure.

Lost in the unhomely world, Emily is a metonymy for the reader:³⁰ Radcliffe is able to name reader and heroine as “us” “terror … leads us, by a kind of fascination, to seek even the object, from which we appear to shrink” (Udolpho, p. 248). She is also an empty sign, overwhelmed by her surroundings: “horror occupied her mind, and excluded for a time, all sense of past, and dread of future misfortune” (p. 249). Emily moves as though she were a pronoun, doubling herself around a loss/misplacement and a fulfillment/address. The operation of pronouns becomes a syntactic figure of sorts for the traces of narrative lacunae in the very words that fill the book. Syntactically speaking, the pronoun's nominal emptiness is the function which guarantees that it has the potential to find its way, accidentally, ambiguously or otherwise, to a noun. Pronouns, too, are lacunae, never as empty as their syntactic function suggests, only looking for a home. And the same kind of function motivates the narrative's homing instinct, though its legitimation is derived from elsewhere. Udolpho's continuing impetus is gathered from the demand Emily is made unwillingly—and as far as she is able, unconsciously—to signify: that she become legible. And that means she must attach herself, or be attached, to a propositional content of some kind. Until she has secured her identity and her sentimental attachments, however, propositions are the last thing she wants to entertain.

Her stubborn resistance to legibility is explained by her status as an unmarried woman. Comfortable inclusion in narrativity, even in a simple sentence, comes to require that she be at least directed towards some other state or person. Early in the novel she discovers a love sonnet written on the wainscot of her father's fishing house. Its author is unknown and “these lines were not inscribed to any person; Emily therefore could not apply them to herself, though she was undoubtedly the nymph of these shades” (p. 7). Later, in the midst of negotiations over her fate, in which she wants no part, Emily's recalcitrance causes words to fail:

“Charming Emily!” exclaimed the Count in an impassioned tone, “let not resentment make you unjust; let me not suffer for the offence of Montoni!—Revoke—”

“Offence!” interrupted Montoni—“Count, this language is ridiculous, this submission is childish!—speak as becomes a man, not as the slave of a petty tyrant.”

“You distract me, Signor; suffer me to plead my own cause; you have already proved insufficient to it.”

“All conversation on this subject, sir,” said Emily, “is worse than useless …”

(p. 200)

During the sequences of Montoni's attempt to unite Emily with Count Morano there is, ostensibly, a discourse revolving around Emily's desire: “‘Why seek to throw me again into the perplexities of doubt, by teaching your eyes to contradict the kindness of your late declaration?”’ asks Morano (p. 198).³¹ Morano and Montoni try to read Emily by treating her visible affect as a signifier of her desire (that is to say orientation towards marriage). The syntax of this reading is dictated by her condition as an unmarried woman facing the marriage offer which would attach her as pronoun to a proper noun. This syntax is inescapable; it is part of the deeper syntax of the narrative, so Emily tries to prevent the reading by refusing to offer signification: “All conversation … is worse than useless.” But because Montoni and Morano already read her singleness as an unfixed need to be married, her attempts to contradict this reading are taken to be duplicity. The scene of reading is invoked in the attempted seduction and in moments like this the lacuna Emily embodies begins to pose a threat even to the primary villain. Montoni and Morano are fighting over who is to occupy the paternal position in the figural reading scene and none of the three wants to be the feminized figure caught in the gaze. The danger femininity holds for Gothic masculinity is its capacity to unseat paternity (actual and figural); the exchangeability and marriageability of Emily may be ruined by slippages of identity,³² or her own resistance, and this in turn subjects her guardians and suitors to threats of death or dishonor.

Let me emphasize again that the dangers and evasions here are characteristic of a first reading. Emily's perceived duplicity is predicated on an implicit demand for a second reading, a revision. In one sense the content of that second reading is (or would be) Emily's true feelings or, more practically speaking, her rewriting of her feelings to accord with Morano's demand: that she agree to rewrite her name as Morano. In another sense the second reading owed by Emily's duplicity is the narrative's pull towards the right renaming. Since first readings in and of Radcliffe tend to be mistaken, the Morano seduction can easily be seen as a rehearsal for the correct seduction which will conclude Emily's adventures. Her discomfort here is not so much with the accusation of duplicity itself; it is with the fact that she cannot but be duplicitous. She does not wish to read or be read until all the documents, including herself, are settled and fully revised. Reading would be better reserved, in other words, until she is sure she is at home. Unfortunately, it is only by reading back along the trail of misreadings that she can find her way home.

The single woman is a difficult double, a “petty tyrant” and a mere object of exchange: “‘this is too much!’ suddenly exclaimed the Count; ‘Signior Montoni, you treat me ill; it is from you I shall look for explanation”’ (p. 201, my emphasis). Despite the currency of Emily's surmised passions, both she and her would-be procurers constantly try to exclude them from the issue. To an accusation of duplicity, Emily replies, “[I] can claim no merit in such conduct, for I have had nothing to conceal” (p. 199). Montoni, however, restates her illegibility as opaque, rather than empty: “the wiles of a female heart are unsearchable.” These are the Scylla and Charybdis that Emily's suitors are set up to navigate: either she is empty of passion, or unmanageably full of it. Radcliffe's prescription for home-making seems compromised by its equivocation over the role of paternalism. If the figure who looks over the shoulder of the heroine is as likely to be a malevolent villain as a kindly father, the propriety of the sexual and domestic contract he sponsors becomes difficult to endorse. With reference to the scene of female reading I described above, the heroine's decision about whether to accept the virtuousness of the proposition before her and the interested man behind her can reliably be confirmed by little outside her own consciousness. By extension, the reader of the novel must be subject to the same kind of danger: that the narrative she reads has only its own eloquence to argue for its suitability as material for a young consumer. And eloquence is, of course, one of the allurements that lead virtue to its undoing.

III. SECOND WARNINGS

Radcliffe seems well aware of the dilemma posed by reading's capacity to delude, even disgrace. The novel is littered with signposts warning of the perils to which unsupervised reading can expose a young, unmarried woman. Emily's father gives her directions, shortly before his death, to find a “packet of written papers” hidden in their home at La Vallee. These she “must burn—and, solemnly I command you, without examining them” (p. 78). She has already accidentally caught sight of her father in his closet, “seated at a small table, with papers before him, some of which he was reading with deep attention and interest, during which he often wept and sobbed aloud” (p. 26). This scene, in passing, exemplifies the daughter's/single woman's capacity to reciprocate the peril which the scene of reading visits upon her. Emily burns the letters as she is instructed, but unthinkingly reads a part of them, “unconscious, that she was transgressing her father's strict injunction, till a sentence of dreadful import awakened her attention and her memory together” (p. 103). We are never told directly what this sentence is. At the end of the novel the content of the letters is only summarized and, like the figure behind the veil, its dreadful import is revoked. Emily's revelation is not shared with us, only its effect: “so powerfully had they affected her, that she even could not resolve to destroy the papers immediately; and the more she dwelt on the circumstances, the more it inflamed her imagination.” Instead of burning the letters, she sets herself imaginatively on fire.

The letters get burned soon afterwards, but this prohibited reading act has unwittingly helped push Emily into the vortex of familial uncertainty and homelessness. It has also set off an affective reaction, an “enervation” of mind that was already growing amid grief and solitude: “it was lamentable, that her excellent understanding should have yielded, even for a moment, to the reveries of superstition, or rather to those starts of imagination, which deceive the senses into what can be called nothing less than momentary madness” (p. 102). Such reactions are exactly what St. Aubert has warned Emily against, at great length, when he tells her: “all excess is vicious; even that sorrow, which is amiable in its origin, becomes a selfish and unjust passion, if indulged at the expense of our duties … The indulgence of excessive grief enervates the mind, and almost incapacitates it” (p. 20).³³

Radcliffe's warnings begin to sound very much like the ones being trumpeted in contemporary tracts about women's education and reading-habits. A survey of late-eighteenth-century treatises shows that the burgeoning novel industry was the focus for much anxious ink-spilling. Compare the quotes above with this from Mary Wollstonecraft:

These are the women who are amused by the reveries of the stupid novelists, who, knowing little of human nature, work up stale tales, and describe meretricious scenes, all retained in a sentimental jargon, which equally tend to corrupt the taste and draw the heart aside from its daily duties. I do not mention the understanding, because never having been exercised, its slumbering energies remain inactive.³⁴

Maria Edgeworth ventriloquizes a “Gentleman to his Friend” advising on women who read too much:

I should not expect that my house affairs would be with haste dispatched by a Desdemona weeping over some unvarnished tale, petrified by some history of horrors … I have heard that if these sublime geniusses are wakened from their reveries by the appulse of external circumstances, they start and exhibit all the perturbation and amazement of cataleptic patients.

(Letters for Literary Ladies, pp. 36-37)

Hannah More, a solid anti-feminist, writes in her Strictures on Female Education:

There is to woman a Christian use to be made of sober studies; while books of an opposite cast, however unexceptionable they may be sometimes found in point of expression, however free from evil in its more gross and palpable shapes, yet by their very nature and constitution they excite a spirit of relaxation, by exhibiting scenes and ideas which soften the mind and set the fancy at work; … and nourish a vain and visionary indolence which lays the mind open to error and the heart to seduction.³⁵

No author with an opinion on young women seems willing to offer more than an equivocal defense of the novel. Other kinds of reading also require strict supervision. Wrong or excessive reading calls up metaphors of many different kinds: from softening or hardening; to relaxation or stimulation; to opening or closing; to swelling or shrinking; to corruption, “fatal poison,”³⁶ and the “unspeakably perverting and inflammatory.”³⁷ Radcliffe's mobilization of the registers of debate on women's reading within her narratives goes right to the heart of her heroines' dilemmas about reading and being read. There is certainly a parallel dilemma in the case of a novelist who works anti-novelistic discourse into her novels. Witness the decadent behavior of Countess de Villefort: “while she reclined on a sofa, and, casting her eyes over the ocean, … indulged in the luxuries of ennui, her companion read aloud a sentimental novel, on some fashionable system of philosophy, for the Countess was herself somewhat of a philosopher, especially as to infidelity” (Udolpho, p. 476). This scene, on the face of it, is an anti-Jacobin moment. Yet it is also a moment of Jacobin-sounding anti-decadence. If there are certain common resonances in discussions of novel-reading across the 1790s' political divides, they would seem to be grist for Radcliffe, who throws the factions all in together. She solicits this kind of contradiction, invoking every kind of reading-phobia even as she hones a narrative technique that aims for the maximum possible enticement-value. The seduction-and-prohibition interface she constructs with her audience is an analog for the punitive prurience with which she chases around her heroines. Reader and heroine alike are invited to confront closed-in mysteries, then rebuffed by failures of cognition. Finally in her novels' conclusions we are presented with catalogues of our persistent misreadings.

There is, it turns out, little to guarantee the propriety of reading Radcliffe novels. The revision which juxtaposes good seductions, genealogies and readings with the bad ones implies the value of interpretive skill. But it is still genre and the market that win in the end; hence the complaint voiced in the Artist in June, 1807: “[addicted readers] admire one novel because it puts them in mind of another … By them is it required that a novel should be like a novel.”³⁸ Exposure as a spectacle in the hot seat of the scene of reading is the moment of risk that Radcliffe demands of her readers. As Peter de Bolla says, the late-eighteenth century's theory of reading, “in its exclusion of the aberrant feminized reading of novels, can be seen as producing the very possibility of its negation, of setting out the territory upon which a feminized subjectivity could be mapped” (p. 267). If we take Wright's scenes as emblematic, pathologized male surveillance of a female reader can hardly be distinguished from benign male control over a wife or daughter's indulgence of her subjectivity in a book.

To complete a novel without losing oneself appears to be much like passing through the marriage market. And yet a happy loss of self is the reward which counterbalances the fear of dissolution prompted by novels and performed by Radcliffe. At the other end of the Gothic tunnel is a promise of unmediated connection, identity without need of external identification—a self-dissolution. After her father's death, Emily visits his grave, “a plain marble, bearing little more than his name and the date of his birth and death” (Udolpho, p. 91). This basic reading act is tantalizing, drawing her towards a place where she can be entirely at one with what she reads, occupying and occupied: “the memory of the dead, and the kindness of the living attached her to the place; and for the sacred spot, where her father's remains were interred, she seemed to feel all those tender affections which we conceive for home.” Observe that Radcliffe slips a first-person plural pronoun into the mix. This is not just an acknowledgment of audience, but a signpost pointing towards the moment when this story's single woman can allow herself to become multiple, or rather, incorporated.

Resolution in Udolpho turns out to be bought by all of Emily's brushes with self-dissolution through dangerous reading. Her eventual benign self-dissolution into the joyous haunts of home has been prepared by her training in self-enclosure. Instead of enclosing her subjectivity, she will enclose a home. Since the revision of lacunae has demonstrated her central role in the disposal of most all her relatives and acquaintances, home and those who are admitted to it are dissolved into her as much as she into them. By resisting the possibility of becoming lost in catastrophic misreading, she learns, with help of course, to reserve herself as the model for a community of perfect sociality where there is no longer any call for interpretive decision and therefore no need for her to be captured by the scene of reading. Home is the key lacuna. For most of the novel it is unlocatable, barred by all the narrative's other lacunae. In resolution its fullness is recovered, and at the same time set beyond the reach of narrative. Ideal domesticity is unspeaking and perfectly articulated. Radcliffe's closure retains the sway of lacunae by turning us out into the marketplace of genre. Here is the receipt for our transaction with the novel. We have acted as proxies for the reader who protects and approves Emily's education into plenitude. Our less-risky imitation of her reading has brought us the correspondingly less-fulfilling reward of completion, and, it may be assumed, a return to the circulating marketplace of the book trade. There we may again indulge the fantasy of endangerment parlayed into bliss, as though we have discovered it for ourselves and for the first time.

The logic of resolution is not just covertly analogous to that of market exchange; the homology is on display. Emily's exposure to the outdoors and the unhome is entirely commensurate with the book's passage through the channels of capital. Reading the novel washes away the taint of monetary circulation and grubby laboring hands but incorporates the lessons of the market into the sentiment which takes its place: “the retrospect of all the dangers and misfortunes they had each encountered, since last [Emily and Valancourt] sat together … exalted the sense of their present felicity” (Udolpho, p. 671). Their reward is precisely the value accrued upon labors undertaken. Closure in domestic novels of the last part of the eighteenth century affords, and aspires to be, the closest possible thing to a definitional testimony to home. The paradox of home, a space in which motion/circulation and stillness/solidity become inseparable instead of undecidable, is the promise of what will be confirmed the moment reading leaves off in The Mysteries of Udolpho. The benevolent, unchanging, yet always prospering economy that home is measured against in the conclusion of the English eighteenth century is not representable, nor is it necessarily inhabitable, but becomes most actual at the intersection between reading and putting the novel down. This is not to say that the marriage and home-coming resolution of a novel is exactly the same as the return to domestic surroundings implied by the scene of reading. Nor is it to say the reverse—merely that the novel and its reader are in irreconcilably different worlds. The point is, nowhere does home come more clearly into focus than when it straddles the end of representation and the fresh beginning of social labor.

The space of home is a space between novels and domestic or extra-domestic enterprise. As The Mysteries of Udolpho is finished (this is how the figuration of home worked), its benediction absorbed, and preparation is made to return it to the circulating library and to exchange it for another novel during the course of a day's duties or endeavors, the perfectly real structure of home is articulated. An economy of loss, completion and renunciation meets and becomes one with an economy of return, expansion, and renewal. Every home is fixed by this epistemic format; it is homologous to every other home, but also entirely unique, private and unrepresentable. As a result, home is neither endangered by the temptations and depredations of an under-regulated market, nor frozen in a sameness that will not register profit, growth and improvement. It is not inflated by the sentiments and panegyrics of novelists, nor is it trampled and soiled by the repetitive labors of daily existence. And it is the particular strategy of novelists like Radcliffe to present home as a something manifested through the representations they withhold. They declare home theirs to bestow by means of the refusal to actually bring it into the light—to unveil it, as it were.

O! how joyful it is to tell of happiness, such as that of Valancourt and Emily; to relate, that, after suffering under the oppression of the vicious and the disdain of the weak, they were, at length, restored to each other—to the beloved landscapes of their native country,—to the securest felicity of this life, that of aspiring to moral and labouring for intellectual improvement—to the pleasures of enlightened society, and to the exercise of the benevolence which had always animated their hearts; while the bowers of La Vallee became, once more, the retreat of goodness, wisdom and domestic blessedness!

(Udolpho, p. 672)

This third to last sentence of Radcliffe's novel is a tableau vivant, and it comes (as tableaux vivants do) by way of lowering the curtain. It only hints in freeze frame at the narrative which might follow, and at the same time forbids or renounces that narrative. The return “to the pleasures of enlightened society, and to the exercise of the benevolence which had always animated their hearts,” is work to be done in closing the book and honoring its enumeration of the qualities of home.

Notes

1. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, edited by Bonamy Dobree (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), p. ix. Subsequent references will be indicated parenthetically in the text.

2. For examples of full discussions of the relationships between novels and the expansion of middle-class domesticity in the late-English eighteenth century, see Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987); Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984); Edward Copeland, Women Writing About Money: Women's Fiction in England, 1790-1820, Cambridge Studies in Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995); Catherine Gallagher, Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).

3. Aline Grant, Ann Radcliffe (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1951), p. 46.

4. Nancy Armstrong has this to say: “novels helped to transform the household into what might be called the ‘counterimage’ of the modern marketplace, an apolitical realm of culture within the culture as a whole” (p. 48).

5. Harriet Guest, “The Wanton Muse: Politics and Gender in Gothic Theory After 1760,” in Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts, 1780-1832, ed. Stephen Copley and John Whale (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 118-39.

6. Quoted in Angela Woollacott, “‘All this is the Empire I told myself’: Australian Women's Voyages ‘Home’ and the Articulation of Colonial Whiteness,” American Historical Review 102 (October 1997): 1004, n.6. The semantic lifetime of this oddly pluralized signifier may well prove to be a pretty close match for the living memory of British empire; it is now passing, rather gracelessly, out of the language.

7. “We have,” says Mr. Burke, “given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable, and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars.” Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), p. 34.

   No, we have not, replies Mr. Paine, we have failed to install a system of property distribution compatible with general comfort and security of living. The “unnatural law of primogeniture” has ensured that “the peer and the beggar are often of the same family. One extreme produces the other: to make one rich the other must be made poor.” Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (New York: Penguin, 1984), p. 257.

8. Mary Favret discusses some of these laws in Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters, Cambridge Studies in Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), p. 79.

9. This particular example of the defence of the hearth rationale comes, oddly enough, from Richard Elsam's An Essay on Rural Architecture (London: E. Lawrence, 1803), p. 46.

10. James Malton, An Essay on British Cottage Architecture (London: Hookham and Carpenter, 1798), p. 3.

11. John Wood, Choir Gaure, Vulgarly Called Stonehenge (Oxford: 1747), p. 76.

12. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. D. G. C. Macnabb, 2 vols. (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1962), 1:64.

13. Caravaggio was an early exemplar of the technique of painting scenes with a single, limited source of light, and Dutch painters, including Schalken and Honthurst, are given credit for making a genre of paintings whose subjects are lit only by a candle. See Judy Egerton, Wright of Derby (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1990), p. 10.

14. Ronald Paulson, Breaking and Remaking: Aesthetic Practice in England, 1700-1820 (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1989), p. 204. Also see Benedict Nicolson, Joseph Wright of Derby: Painter of Light, 2 vols., Studies in British Art Series (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, and the Paul Mellon Foundation for British Art, 1968), p. 40.

15. See Terry Castle, “The Spectralization of the Other in The Mysteries of Udolpho,” The New Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 231-53.

16. I borrow this definition of fiction from Catherine Gallagher, who, in her introduction to Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820, says of mid-eighteenth-century novels, “nothingness … seemed to contain at least the potential for a new and more positive form: the form of the fictional Nobody, a proper name explicitly without a physical referent in the real world” (p. xiv).

17. Henri Lefebvre writes of “the functioning of capitalism, which contrives to be blatant and covert at one and the same time.” The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 49.

18. Peter de Bolla contends that as a direct spin-off from the scene of female reading “a kind of textual commodification results, in which the text is both an object for the performance of male sexuality and the repository of female subjectivity.” The Discourse of the Sublime (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 278.

19. Cannon Schmitt, “Techniques of Terror, Technologies of Nationality: Ann Radcliffe's The Italian,” ELH 61 (1994): 870.

20. Quoted in Deborah D. Rogers, ed., The Critical Response to Ann Radcliffe (Westwood, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), p. 121.

21. Home is also the novel's origin, though the plot convulsions which obliterate the homeness of Emily's home for most of the novel also leave it a substantially redefined location when it is reclaimed.

22. Quoted in Schmitt, p. 876, n. 43.

23. Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit, Meridian Crossing Aesthetics series (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1993), p. 20.

24. Recent criticism of Radcliffe has found it all but impossible to steer around this scene. I have come across examinations by Terry Castle (pp. 243ff); Claudia Johnson in Equivocal Beings (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 96ff; Robert Miles in Ann Radcliffe the Great Enchantress (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 135ff; Adela Pinch in Strange Fits of Passion (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 113ff; and Claire Kahane in “The Gothic Mirror,” in The (M)other Tongue, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), p. 339.

25. This meditation seems practically culled from Edmund Burke: “Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force.” A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), p. 53.

26. I will explore the anti-novelistic implications of this and other aspects of Radcliffe's work in greater detail later on.

27. Mary Poovey, in “The Production of Abstract Space,” Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation 1830-1864 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 25-54, argues that the social space of the late-eighteenth century comes to be formatted upon “the logic of the factory”: “abstract space was symbolically and materially associated with homologies: seriality, repetitious actions, reproducible products; interchangeable places, behaviors and activities” (p. 29). Hence all social practice may be considered, in this light, a form of productive labor. I certainly wish to apply this conceptual format to the reading of novels.

28. Maria Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies, ed. Gina Lurie, Feminist Controversy in England 1788-1810 Series (New York: Garland, 1974).

29. Frances Burney, The Wanderer, ed. Margaret Ann Doody, Robert L. Mack, and Peter Sabor, Oxford World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), p. 508.

30. If Emily is to function, properly speaking, as a metonymy she must be considered metonymic of her readership. On the other hand, in the context of horrific encounters with self-loss, the reader is a metonymy for Emily.

31. Nancy Armstrong writes, “The modern female body comprised a grammar of subjectivity capable of regulating desire, pleasure, the ordinary care of the body, the conduct of courtship” (p. 95).

32. Emily's parentage and legitimacy are thrown into doubt by her father's attachment to a mysterious woman's image (she turns out to be his sister) and her own resemblance to debased figures.

33. The Romance of the Forest features a wonderful example of Radcliffe's play with the perils of women's reading. Its heroine, Adeline, discovers a damaged manuscript—full of lacunae, naturally—“What she had read of the MS awakened a dreadful interest in the fate of the writer, and called up terrific images to her mind” (p. 128); “he [the writer of the MS] spoke in the energy of truth, and, by a strong illusion of fancy, it seemed as if his past sufferings were at this moment present … to her distempered senses the suggestions of a bewildered mind appeared with the force of reality” (p. 132). Ed. Chloe Chard, The World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986).

34. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 306.

35. Hannah Moore, Strictures on Female Education (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1995), p. 181.

36. From John Gregory, A Father's Legacy to His Daughters (1774). Quoted in Alan Richardson, Literature, Education and Romanticism, Cambridge Studies in Romanticism Series (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), p. 186.

37. From James Fordyce, Sermons for Young Women (1796). Quoted in Richardson, p. 186.

38. Quoted in J. T. Taylor, Early Opposition to the English Novel (New York: King's Crown Press, 1943), p. 48.