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Diana Wallace, Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013. viii + 251 pp.
In Female Gothic Histories, Diana Wallace aims to retrieve a tradition of women's historical fiction that, she claims, has been excluded from dominant accounts of the genre's development. Traditionally traced back to the work of Sir Walter Scott, historical fiction, according to Wallace, has "an alternative female genealogy" (5) that begins decades before Scott in Sophia Lee's The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times (1783-1785) and extends all the way to the present. To this assertion she adds a second major claim: women's historical fiction blurs one of the essential boundaries used by Scott himself, and theorists after him, to define the historical novel - the boundary between history and the Gothic.
"To say something is 'Gothic' is at once to imply that it is obsessed with the return of the past, and to define it as unhistorical, not 'proper' history, fantasy rather than fact," Wallace writes. By contrast, historical fiction in the tradition of Scott "is defined partly by its eschewing of the fantastic, the supernatural, and (ironically) the 'fictional' in the sense of the invented or imaginary" (4). But the line separating Gothic and history, she argues, was never really that clear; moreover, if we include historical fiction by women in the analysis, we find narratives of the past frequently unfolded through Gothic conventions. According to Wallace, the Gothic works as a "mode of history" for women because its signature components - "the obsession with inheritance, lost heirs and illegitimate offspring" (5) as well as ghosts, murder, sexual violence, abduction, and dispossession - help articulate women's experiences and their problematic status in both history and historiography.
The Recess, discussed in Chapter 2, offers a fascinating example. The title of Lee's novel refers to the underground chambers that serve as home and hiding place for Matilda and Ellinor, the twin daughters of Mary Queen of Scots. Raised in secrecy, the sisters eventually emerge in the England of Elizabeth I to experience a series of romantic-political misadventures that lead to madness and death. The Recess, Wallace shows, has both literary and historiographic intertexts. It echoes earlier experiments in spinning fictions around historical figures (Madame...