>LITTERARIA PRAGENSIA 2025 (35) 69
ABSTRACT (en)
Mary Robinson’s first novel, Vancenza (1792), charted a new path for politically liberal women writers. Robinson used her pre-existing reputation as an actress, mistress and established poet to carve out a space in which she could write and publish fiction, avoiding some of the pitfalls for eighteenth-century women of participating too eagerly (or at all) in public life. Vancenza challenges inherited relationships of patriarchal and political authority to argue for the importance of radical social change, weighing its destructive nature together with its positive moral value. Is the disclosure of truth a crucial step on the path to justice, or a misguided intervention that can lead only to suffering? Robinson uses Gothic tropes as coded political symbols, producing a political novel disguised as a Gothic one, in order to advocate societal reform rooted in honest reckoning with the past. Even if painful – so painful that the shock of it kills – Vancenza presents such a reckoning, and the change it brings, as the only path to moral regeneration.
KEYWORDS (en)
Gothic, Romanticism, Mary Robinson, women’s writing, architecture, feminism, reform
DOI
https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2025.69.4
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