BARRETT, Eaton Stannard Heroine, or Adventures of a Fair Romance Reader, The 1813
A Delightful Burlesque, Particularly on the Radcliffe Style Jane AustenBARRETT, Eaton Stannard. The Heroine, or Adventures of a Fair Romance Reader. In Three Volumes. London: Printed for Henry Colburn, Public Library, Conduit-Street, Hanover-Square; and sold by George Goldie, Edinburgh, and John Cumming, Dublin, 1813.First edition. Three small octavo volumes (5 7/8 x 3 13/16 inches; 148 x 97 mm.). xx, 224; [2], 239, [1, blank]; [2], 302, [2, publisher s advertisements] pp. Contemporary dark green horizontally-ribbed cloth. Front cover stamped in blind with the royal arms of Great Britain (United Kingdom) and Hanover, back cover stamped in blind with a central cartouche, spine decoratively stamped and lettered in gilt, edges sprinkled red. From the library of the Royal House of Hanover at Marienberg, Germany, with a pencilled shelfmark ( 1141 ) on the front pastedown of Volume I. A fine copy, in a contemporary royal cloth binding. Published in 1813, The Heroine quite clearly draws on the content and conventions of other texts as a way of creating its comic effects. More specifically, the contrivances and contraptions of Gothic novels are much in evidence as the eponymous heroine turns her back on a humdrum rural existence and embarks upon a set of picaresque adventures. While Jane Austen s Northanger Abbey (1818) has long been enjoyed as an entertaining engagement with the Gothic (first as a burlesque and more recently as a subtle appropriation of Gothic conventions for the purpose of exploring dark but mundane truths), Barrett s The Heroine has fallen into obscurity. Austen s famous novel begins with the words, No one who had seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine . Barrett s heroine , Cherry Wilkinson, is a similarly unlikely candidate for the role; like Catherine Morland, she is a novel reader but one who wilfully sets out to adopt an identity modelled on the fictional heroines she has encountered. The result is that the story of Cherry s adventures, like those of Catherine Morland, bears a parodic relationship to the novels of her time Jane Austen, in a letter dated 2 March 1814, comments: I finished The Heroine last night and was very much amused by it It diverted me exceedingly I have torn through the third volume I do not think it falls off. It is a delightful burlesque particularly on the Radcliffe style (Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, Dead Funny: Eaton Stannard Barrett s The Heroine as Comic Gothic, Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text, Articles, Issue 5 (November 2000) at http://www.cf.ac.uk/encap/corvey/articles/cc05_n02.html).Summers, Gothic Bibliography, p. 354.
$US5500
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