Natalie Neill’s scholarly edition of Mary Charlton’s Rosella, or Modern Occurrences (1799), was published by Routledge this month. Part Gothic parody, part travel narrative, Rosella is the most recent addition to Routledge’s Chawton House Library Women’s Novels Book Series. The edition is the first non-facsimile edition of the novel to appear since 1801. To learn more about the book and how to order a copy, visit this website.
Description:
Mary Charlton’s 1799 Rosella, or Modern Occurrences is a fascinating novel that brokers between conservative and feminist ideas, humour and horror, and indulgence in and ridicule of sentimental tropes. Written in imitation of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1615) and Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752), Rosella belongs to a large class of comic works in which female readers and novelists are satirized. This edition not only addresses the gap in knowledge about Charlton’s work, but will be of particular interest to scholars working on the Romantic literary market of the 1790s, especially Minerva Press publications. The book engages with many of the themes explored in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, from women’s writing and female education to popular fiction and sensibility. Accompanied by a new introduction by Professor Natalie Neill, this title will be of great interest to students and scholars of literary history.