SOURCE: Hoeveler, Diana Long. “Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya: A Case Study in Miscegenation as Sexual and Racial Nausea.” European Romantic Review 8, no. 2 (1997): 185-99.

In the following essay, Hoeveler characterizes Zofloya as a racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic work which typifies the popular colonialist and sexist consciousness of bourgeois England in the early nineteenth century. The critic reads Victoria as the aristocratic woman whose open war on bourgeois values is justly punished, and pays particular attention to the responsibility Dacre places on Victoria's mother.

Zofloya, or the Moor was Charlotte Dacre's second novel, written when she was 24 years old (or so she claimed) and the beautiful toast of London literary circles. Her first novel, The Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer, was written when she was eighteen (or 28, depending on what biographical source one credits) and in the grip of an infatuation with the excessive gothicism of Lewis' The Monk...