SOURCE: Craciun, Adriana. Introduction to Zofloya; or, The Moor, pp. 9-32. Orchard Park, N.Y.: Broadview Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Craciun highlights the literary significance of Dacre's unique female characters, focusing especially on how Victoria's assertive sexuality, sadistic violence, and willful desire for mastery embody traits of the male Gothic villain. The critic also discusses how Dacre's thematic distinction between natural sex and cultural gender along with her emphasis on active existence over fixed essence accounts for Victoria's corporeal transformations.

Charlotte Dacre and the “vivisection of Virtue”

The protagonist of Charlotte Dacre's best-known novel, Zofloya, or the Moor (1806), is unique in women's Gothic and Romantic literature, and has more in common with the heroines of the Marquis de Sade or M. G. Lewis than with those of Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, or Jane Austen. No heroine of Radcliffe or Austen could exult, as Victoria does in Zofloya...