Alert Catherine Morland — Gothic heroines are IN!
The Age has an article about an upcoming film festival in Melbourne featuring Gothic heroines, and of course dear Miss Morland is mentioned, though not by name.
Women were the subjects, readers and often the writers of gothic fiction, which first flourished in the 18th century. It is a genre with its share of detractors: for example, in Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen satirised the novels of a popular novelist of the time. Austen created an impressionable and naive heroine whose overheated imagination conjures up sinister goings-on all around her.
Austen’s heroine finds that nothing is as terrible as she imagines it to be, but the women who inhabit the world of the female gothic - and the women of Lady Beware - discover, in general, that their fears are not exaggerations but rather apprehensions of reality.
Too bad there isn’t a good film version of NA to add to that festival for comparison purposes. *cough*
