Book Description

Helen Craik’s Adelaide de Narbonne, with Memoirs of Charlotte de Cordet was published anonymously at the Minerva Press in 1800, the third of five novels that Craik wrote between 1796 and 1805. Deeply rooted in the contemporary historical milieu of her time, Craik’s novel features the sanguinary events of post-revolutionary France, including the war in the Vendée as well as “The Terror”. Described by critics as a “unique hybrid of historical Gothic,” the novel is indeed permeated by Gothic elements that draw their material directly from the more celebrated novels by Ann Radcliffe and Horace Walpole. Borrowing from customary and well-oiled Gothic visual elements, from the landscapes surrounding the castle and the rock of Narbonne, to old monasteries and half-ruined edifices, Craik builds the fascinating story of the Countess Adelaide de Narbonne, whose character partly represents the author’s own rebellion against parental authority and despotism. Fashioning Adelaide de Narbonne as the traditional Gothic heroine characterized by refined sensibility and virtue in distress, who staunchly rejects the oppression of male authorities, Craik connects the story of the Countess with that of Charlotte de Cordet (Charlotte Corday), Jean-Paul Marat’s murderer, undoubtedly more than a mere “appendix” to Adelaide’s story, as the title of the novel suggests. Here reprinted and annotated for the first time, Helen Craik’s Adelaide de Narbonne, with Memoirs of Charlotte de Cordet joins the voices of numerous late eighteenth-century British women writers who openly defied the patriarchal system of values of the time, symbolically represented in the characters of Marat, Robespierre, and the whole system of the Terror in post-revolutionary France, to promote a challenge and a subversion of the traditional stereotypes of the delicate, passive woman of the age of sensibility.