SOURCE: Craciun, Adriana. “‘I hasten to be disembodied’: Charlotte Dacre, the Demon Lover, and Representations of the Body.” European Romantic Review 6, no. 1 (1995): 75-97.

In the following essay, Craciun studies the prevailing opinions of science and epistemology during the latter half of the eighteenth century, a context within which she develops her thesis that Dacre's work, particularly her poetry, holds more complex, positive concepts of sexuality, the body, and the demon lover than we previously thought.

And if it is in death that the spirit becomes free, in the manner of spirits, it is not until then that the body too comes properly into its own.

—Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (217)

Charlotte Dacre¹ chose to rename herself “Rosa Matilda” after the demon lover in Lewis's The Monk, a gesture which invites us to re-examine the relationship between women and demon lovers. All work on the demon...