Charlotte Dacre (1782–1825)

What a wild, extremely melodramatic ride.

It was easy to slot characters/actions in this book into modern parallels such as Killing Eve, soap operas, trashy reality tv, the Satanic Panic, Kick Ass, Mean Girls, Sex in the City, & more, followed by a tell-all interview with Oprah where a known "bad girl" blames her evilness on her mom's lax parenting & loose morals. If ever a Gothic novel plot was made for our era of tweets & TikToks, this is it.

Which is quite a feat considering it was show more published in 1806. Charlotte Dacre really did flip Gothic horror on its side to give us a sexually adventurous, lustful, vengeful, murderous anti-heroine.

There are caveats related to the prejudices of the time here (the subtitle The Moor will give you a hint as to one), the plotting & writing definitely could have used a steady editorial hand, & current editions should make the effort to correct typos throughout. But if you're up for a Gothic novel with a subversive bent, you might want to check this one out -- it's a sex, drugs, & rock & roll story set in the 15th century. Plus murder. show less

Zofloya; or, The Moor is as much the product of one woman’s palsied, eccentric neurosis as it is the chief example of Matthew Lewis’ influence on the Female Gothic. Charlotte Dacre, firmly setting aside the pastoral ‘terrors’ of Ann Radcliffe, establishes in her most widely-read novel conventions of female sadism that were, for their time, near-revolutionary. That they were not picked up by other authors until considerably later in the 19th Century is intriguing. Still more show more intriguing is that Zofloya; or, The Moor is, despite its almost shocking cruelty, a novel concerned to its very last lines with the supremacy of proper, uncorrupted morality.

But how is one to demonstrate the virtue of morality without first detailing, for several hundred pages, the absolute depths of corruption and depravity? This is no Torture Garden, certainly, but, for its day, the concerns of Zofloya; or, The Moor were certainly controversial: shameless adultery, scandalous violence, the suggestion of miscegenation, Satanism, liberated sexuality. And where else would a proper British novelist set these scenes of Gothic excess than in recondite, libertine Venice?

Zofloya uses its ‘ultimate morality’ as a scapegoat: Dacre’s attention is near-entirely devoted to the painted perversity of her subjects. Her own life is a testament to the enduring mystery of ‘created’ identity, subject, and morality; that there is a war, though, taking place among the pretty ruins of her muse is quite obvious: her most interesting creation, Victoria, is at turns a prototype of the justified feminist and, conversely, the villain of what descends quite neatly into one of the precursors of the ‘Slasher’ film. But the incongruity of Dacre’s irreconcilable compulsions is even more evident in the construction of her mysterious, titular ‘Moor,’ Zofloya, who only appears a little over halfway into the book: vacillating between extremes of physical beauty and physical repugnance, charm and repulsion, vile sorcerer and loyal protector—it is as though Dacre had painted the picture of her fantasies of miscegenation and diabolism, and then, fearing the effect her own proclivities might have on both her work and her reputation, quickly sought to repudiate them within the space of a few paragraphs. The curious thing is that she hasn’t removed the more obviously erotic paeans to the Moor at all: apparently repudiation is enough to clear her of any ‘immoral’ indulgence in her construction of a ‘moral’ fable. To a modern audience, though, more comprehensively skeptical of the cancers of racism, these passages of disavowal will seem almost absurdly irrelevant, and, often, highly confusing; but thus is the nature of Dacre’s neurosis, and this contrast in perspectives was not entirely lost on contemporary critics.

It is, perhaps, surprising that Zofloya; or, The Moor had a profound influence on the young Percy Shelley, one of the more graceful poets in our language; but Dacre’s prose is remarkably economical for its time, and there is actually great beauty to be found here. That it is also the product of a mind that lived as Gothic a life as the characters she created, however, is immediately apparent, and this novel appeals as much to general curiosity as it does to the search for an entertaining narrative or academic analysis. show less

Kind of strange and wonderful and horrible, in the fashion of The Monk by Lewis, Zofloya is full of murder, betrayal, jealousy, simply horrid intentions. And, as a gothic text, there's a fair bit of lust, fainting, sighing, and exclamation points to be had as well, not to mention a number of melodramatic twists, and a great deal of stabbing...

All told, this isn't a book for everyone, but it will provide entertainment to lovers of the gothic and fans of early horror. And, probably, to fans of show more soap opera-like plots, played out on the page. Dacre's characters are far from sympathetic, and fairly superficial, but the book moves fairly quickly once it gets going, and has enough to distinguish it from other more popular gothics that, in truth, I'm glad to have read it, and would rather have read this than some of the more well-known ones I encountered in a class on the subject. The melodrama of the plot carries it with it a certain horrifying charm (admittedly more like watching a car accident than reading a fairy tale), and the fact that one reviewer was driven to call The Monk a chaste text in comparison says quite a lot for what you'll encounter here.

One caveat is that it takes on a rather slow start, but for interested readers, there's enough here to warrant following through on the full read... show less

In all fairness, this book is terrible. It's garbage -- utterly self-indulgent, riddled with improbabilities and plot holes, ludicrously didactic, and sexist and racist to boot. And yet, for all that, it's almost incredible. Like most bad literature, it sometimes feels like you're gazing directly at the author's soul, at all her neuroses and cultural assumptions and delusions of grandeur laid bare. All of which makes it a deeply engrossing (if disturbing) document of its cultural context.