SOURCE: Dunn, James A. “Charlotte Dacre and the Feminization of Violence.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 53, no. 3, (1998): 307-27.

In the following essay, Dunn includes all of Dacre's novels in his discussion of how Dacre's texts' erotic imagination and Machiavellian violence are concomitantly liberating and tragic, a duality that explains her works' potential for dramatic irony.

Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naiveté, kept in the dark about herself, led into self-disdain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism, hasn't been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives … hasn't accused herself of being a monster?

—Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”

Charlotte Dacre occupies a peculiar and largely unexamined place in the ideology of the Gothic novel and of early-nineteenth-century Britain in general. She explores through her heroines the violence of female sexual desire...