FALL 2025
Beyond the Female Gothic: Wild Women in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
Blythe Meacham
Angelo State University
Blythe is a third year student at Angelo State University working towards her BA/MA in English. Originally from Idaho, she currently lives in San Angelo, Texas.
Since its creation in the mid-eighteenth century, Gothic literature has remained popular for its ability to thrill audiences and controversial in its ability to scandalize them, particularly when it comes to the role of women as characters and authors. Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or the Moor, for instance, shocked the sensibilities of its readers when it was first published in 1806. The novel follows the downfall of the di Loredani family, whose members, after the arrival of the knave Count Ardolph, descend into murder, adultery, and thievery. Victoria de Loredani especially, under the influence of the servant – and her eventual lover – Zofloya, falls into a life of vice, taking on the role of the Gothic villain in the story. She engages in seduction, imprisonment, and murder until Zofloya, now revealed to be the devil in disguise, drags her soul to hell for eternity. Readers were both enthralled and scandalized by such topics, particularly when written by a woman. As one early reviewer bemoaned,
[t]here is a voluptuousness of language and allusion… which we should have hoped, that
the delicacy of the female pen would have refused to trace; and there is an exhibition of
wantonness of harlotry, which we would have hoped, that the delicacy of the female
mind, would have been shocked to imagine. (Craciun)
Despite this shocking “voluptuousness” (or perhaps owing to it), the novel, like others of the Gothic genre, was immensely popular. As Fred Botting puts it in his critical overview of the genre, the appeal of the Gothic was in its ability to allow the reader engagement with the transgression of vice and the taboo in a distant, and thus safe, manner. By flirting with the boundaries of social norms and conventions, these texts make their audience aware of both the existence of such boundaries and “the protection they offer” (Botting).
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights received similar treatment upon its publication in 1847. Like Zofloya, it depicts a family’s fall into ruin and the sins of one generation being inflicted upon the next. Also like Zofloya, the novel engaged with vice, and thus solicited scandal. Although popular and compelling, Wuthering Heights was initially censured by early reviewers for a “disgusting coarseness” of language and “confusion” of morals (Peterson 334), so much so that Charlotte Brontë felt compelled to defend her sister’s work in a Preface to the second edition, claiming that “she did not know what she had done” in having “wrought creations like Heathcliff, like Earnshaw, like Catherine” (22-23).
More recent criticism has placed Wuthering Heights and Zofloya in the contexts of feminist, postcolonial, or psychoanalytical theory. As in other Gothic texts, there has been an emphasis on the psychology and desires of female characters like Victoria or Catherine, particularly in regard to the writings of Freud. Critics also have explored the societal fears revealed in the representations of Zofloya and Heathcliff as cultural “others” of the British Empire. In this essay I will address the intersection between Zofloya and Wuthering Heights, specifically in their portrayal of atypical Gothic heroines. First, I will discuss how the Gothic tradition established standard tropes for the portrayal of its female characters, and then turn to examine the cultural contexts that establish these roles. Then, I will explore how the central characters in these novels defy the domestic roles that were typically assigned to women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both Victoria and Catherine Earnshaw disrupt the boundaries of domesticity through their engagement with their natural passions, as well as their relationship with men whose cultural identities blur the social hierarchies and boundaries of English society. Dacre and Brontë differ, however, in their final treatment of such heroines. Dacre’s Victoria suffers the ultimate punishment – eternal damnation – while Brontë’s characters face a more ambiguous fate. Both of these novels reveal the way in which the interplay between conceptions of natural and civilizing forces play a role in shaping human lives, particularly women and those perceived as “other.”
"THE FEMALE GOTHIC":
AUTHORS AND HEROINES
The most basic trappings of the Gothic heroine can be traced back to what is widely considered to be the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s 1764 The Castle of Otranto. The dual heroines Isabella and Matilda are innocent, pious, and lovely, and beleaguered with trials thrust upon them by an older, powerful man, the early version of the Gothic villain. The lord of the castle of Otranto, Manfred, makes unwanted and adulterous advances towards Isabella, whose engagement to his son was suddenly ended after an unfortunate, bizarre accident involving a giant helmet. Isabella, of course, rejects Manfred, fleeing through subterranean passages to the sanctuary of a nearby abbey. Manfred’s daughter, Matilda, also suffers. Manfred offers her hand in marriage in an attempt to win favor with Isabella’s widower father, Frederick, despite her love for the young Theodore. After a series of near escapes and supernatural episodes, tensions come to a head when Manfred violently interrupts what he believes to be a romantic tryst between Isabella and Theodore. It is Matilda, however, not Isabella whom Manfred attacks and slays. Saintly to the last, Matilda gently chastises, but forgives her father for his crimes. The repentant Manfred retires to a convent, and Isabella and Theodore wed and rule Otranto.
Although Walpole’s characters were fairly one-dimensional, Gothic heroines became more complex as the genre progressed. Ann Radcliffe, writing in the late eighteenth century, developed female main characters who were “simultaneously persecuted victim and courageous heroine” (Moer 91). Like Walpole’s heroines, these characters often suffered at the hands of powerful men. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, Emily St. Aubert is imprisoned in a remote Italian castle by her uncle and threatened with marriage to the odious Count Morano. Another of Radcliffe’s novels, Romance of the Forest sees its heroine, Adeline, being pursued by a murderous Marquis who, as it turns out, has stolen her father’s title and legacy. Ultimately, both heroines escape their villains and are reunited with their respective love interests. What differentiates these heroines (and others like them) from Walpole’s is what Radcliffe termed a “wise passiveness,” although Hoeveler argues that this is really “a form of passive-aggression” (Hoeveler 7). Hoeveler claims that it is a sense of cultivated or “professionalized” innocence and femininity that allows that Gothic heroine to “dispose of her enemies without dirtying her dainty little hands” (7). Although prone to displays of sensibility in which she is overtaken with terror or sorrow, the Gothic heroine ultimately is restrained and controlled into a virtuous, blameless figure.
The Gothic genre as a whole allows both its writers and readers to engage with societal fears and anxieties. However, there are distinctions within the focus of female writers as opposed to their male counterparts. Botting notes that men tended to “lean towards representations of irrationality and the supernatural,” while women “remain more concerned with the limits of eighteenth-century virtues, careful to interrogate rather than overstep the boundaries of domestic propriety which, because of their gender, were more critically maintained” (Botting). Female authors would often express anxieties most salient to their lives and place in society, such as inheritance laws or the ideals of domesticity. In Romance of the Forest, for instance, part of the Marquis’s villainy is that he has taken Adeline’s rightful inheritance for himself. Through their “professionally feminine, virginal, innocent, and good” heroine, however, these authors can subvert and triumph over the “male-centered system of oppression and corruption” within their works, if not in real life (Hoeveler 9, 10). This concept is what Hoeveler identifies as the “Female Gothic.”
The Female Gothic received particular critical attention beginning in the 1970s. Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) was among the first to examine women’s literature of the nineteenth century through a feminist lens, bringing these works into the literary canon. Ellen Moers, in her book Literary Women (1976), further explores the biographical and historiographical contexts of these sources. She examines the works of such writers as Mary Shelley and Christina Rossetti from the background of the societal and personal conflicts that would inevitably have influenced them. Later, Nancy Armstrong furthered this discussion in her book on the emergence of novels written by women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the context of history and the development of the middle-class. In thinking about the domestic world these novels portray, Armstrong brings together the political and cultural contexts that were previously taken as separate entities. She traces how the rise of a new female ideal strengthened the middle class and contested culturally established views of sexuality. Such novels as written by the Brontës or Dacre were viewed as a “distortion of domestic convention,” used to explore desires that were forbidden by society, or that the authors could not consciously acknowledge (187).
"BEAUTY AND THE BEAST":
ZOFLOYA AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE FEMALE GOTHIC
Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya is distinct from others of the Female Gothic, particularly in the representation of its main character, Victoria. Victoria’s tendency to give in to her “wildest passions” instead of civilized domesticity marks a departure from the tradition of Gothic heroines (Dacre). Dacre’s “voluptuous” novel is set in fifteenth century Italy, where the noble di Loredani family is trespassed upon with the arrival of Count Ardolph. Ardolph seduces the marchioness Laurina away from her husband and children, and later returns to kill her husband, the Marchese. These events affect the di Loredani children greatly; Leondardo runs away to join the company of thieves and murderers and Victoria begins her descent towards villainy. Initially, the young Victoria lives with her mother and Ardolph at Monte Bello, where she is exposed to “the voice of mirth and folly” through the carousel of “most of the dissolute and many of the thoughtless inhabitants of Venice” who inhabited their home (Dacre). She meets the philosophical Count Berenza among these visitors, and the two plan to elope. They are discovered, however, and Victoria is sent away to her austere, heavily religious relative. The attempt to curb Victoria’s passions fails when she eventually escapes back to Berenza in Venice. Because of the scandal surrounding her family, Berenza is hesitant to take Victoria as his wife, although he happily consents to have her as his mistress. After a failed assassination attempt prompts Berenza to put aside his pride and propose marriage, Victoria, who hitherto had been unaware of the true reason for his hesitancy, is enraged. She agrees to marry Berenza, but secretly vows her revenge.
Years pass, and Victoria’s hatred grows for her now husband. Instead, she becomes infatuated with Bereneza’s brother, Henriquez, who, in turn, is in love with the lovely, tragically orphaned Lilla. It is here that Victoria meets the regal, charismatic Moor servant, Zofloya, who offers to help her. Under his guidance, Victoria moves the household to an isolated castle in the Alps and begins to slowly poison Berenza. Her desire for Henriquez, however, is not as easily won, even after Berenza’s death. Eventually, she imprisons her rival, Lilla, in a secret cell and uses more poison to seduce Henriquez, who believes Victoria to be Lilla on their wedding night. His eyes are opened the morning after, and he promptly runs himself through with his sword. Enraged to the edge of madness, Victoria murders Lilla, stabbing her and throwing her body off of a cliff.
Although still a servant, Zofloya’s social status becomes rather ambiguous throughout the second act of the novel. He is described as regal and almost sublime, and Victoria is often struck with a mixture of “inexplicable awe” and “terror” during their interactions. Throughout the course of their relationship, during which Zofloya supplies Victoria with the means to kill her husband and seduce Henriquez, the readers, if not Victoria, become aware of a shifting of roles. As the relationship becomes more dependent, and eventually sexual, Zofloya seems to gain more and more authority until he has become master of Victoria rather than the other way around. Ultimately, Victoria becomes completely dependent on Zofloya as the two flee into the mountains once their crimes are discovered. It is here that he reveals himself to not truly be a Moor servant, but “the sworn enemy of all created nature” in disguise. He revels in “the glory of [Victoria’s] utter destruction” now that she “hast damned [her] soul with unnumbered crimes,” and “whirl[s] her headlong down the dreadful abyss… into the foaming waters below!” (Dacre). According to Cracium, it is precisely this relationship which differentiates Dacre’s work from others of the genre:
[I]t [the Female Gothic] counters the misogyny of the male Gothic such as Lewis’s… by
imagining the male as a potentially dangerous Other who can be transformed by love; in
Williams’s words, ‘The Female Gothic plot is a version of ‘Beauty and the Beast’’ (145).
As is Zofloya, of course, but in an entirely different way. Dacre’s Beauty loves not the
Prince she recognizes as the true self within the Beast, but instead the Beast himself, and
the beast in herself. (Cracium)
Victoria’s “beast,” as it were, seems to be an unchecked overflow of emotion. Dacre often links Victoria’s “wildest passions” with her misdeeds, saying that “to gratify them she possessed an unshrinking relentless soul, that would not startle at the darkest crime” (Dacre). Throughout the novel Victoria is driven by her desires, whether it is in running away with her lover or committing acts of violence. Ultimately, it is Victoria’s desire for Henriquez that leads her to Zofloya, and her subsequent demise. Dacre constantly cautions her readers of the dangers of harboring such “stormy passions of the soul, goading on to ruin and despair,” claiming that “Over their passion and their weaknesses, mortals cannot keep a curb too strong.”
It is not these traits alone, however, that contribute to Victoria’s descent into vice. Dacre, in another moralizing interjection, warns that “strict education alone can correct the faults in our nature.” Even before her mother’s infidelity and abandonment, her young parents’ lack of guidance led Victoria to become “proud, haughty, and self-sufficient – of a wild, ardent, and irrepressible spirit… of an implacable, revengeful, and cruel nature.” It is on Laurina especially that Dacre lays the charge of neglecting “the sacred charge” of the “just formation of their [her children’s] minds.” Added to this, Dacre points to her inability to provide a virtuous role model as key to Victoria’s moral degradation. After all, it is the relationship between Laurina and Ardolph that prompts Victoria’s wish for a lover of her own; she emulates her mother in her elopement with Berenza, as well as her later obsession with Henriquez. Both Victoria’s natural traits and lack of cultivation contribute to her character, as she learns to hide her true feelings, creating almost a double life, and becomes skilled at manipulation.
It is through Victoria’s life and misdeeds that Dacre presents the transgression of societal expectations for domesticity. Lim argues that Dacre presents a series of interconnected and infectious “open households” in which visitors pass in and out and importance is placed on sexual passions that bend boundaries (Lim 127). These households stand in contrast to and subvert the Enlightenment ideals of a bourgeois family, as well as of a self-enclosed Lockean household. Lim also engages with the novel’s anxiety of the perversion of hospitality, in which strangers who are allowed into the home become “parasites,” such as Count Ardolph and his mission to disfigure familial bliss (130). It is not only the guests who violate the rules of hospitality, but the hosts as well; these roles eventually become blurred. Victoria, as mistress of her household, has a very specific role and set of responsibilities, particularly in regards to her guests, Henriquez and Lilla. Her dissatisfaction with her union, however, causes her to disregard this domestic role, with violent outcomes, complicating the common trope of marriage as a “happy ending.” Nayar also argues that the encroachment of hospitality and transgression of boundaries reflects anxieties about the erosion of the European household. These concerns are visible, he claims, in the actions of both Victoria and her mother Laurina. These women both violate the laws of hospitality by allowing infidelity (and murder, in the case of Victoria) within domestic boundaries.
Another way Victoria disrupts this boundary of her societal role and the domestic world is through her relationship with Zofloya, who, as a servant from Africa, exists partially outside of the strictly delineated societal and domestic strata. Victoria’s relationship with and response to Zofloya blurs the social boundaries between nobility and servant, slave and equal (242). It is in these indefinable qualities that Nayar identifies what he terms the “interracial sublime,” as Victoria is drawn to Zofloya’s charm and subtle manipulations by a sense of both terror and beauty. The true climax of the interracial sublime, however, is in the realization of Zofloya’s level of control over Victoria and her demise. Nayar argues that this contributes to a critique of women’s sexual agency as the final punishment for a woman who “wavers” from the boundaries of domestic role and invites in the interracial sublime.
CIVILIZATION AND WILDNESS IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS:
Wuthering Heights contains many striking similarities to Zofloya, though its ideas play out more subtly and realistically on the Yorkshire moors. Brontë’s heroine, Catherine, also pushes at the boundaries of domestic civilization through her natural passions, although less overtly than does Victoria. The novel follows the inhabitants of the two houses of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange over the course of two generations, as narrated by housekeeper Nelly Dean to the new tenant Lockwood. The story begins with old Mr. Earnshaw bringing home to his two children – Catherine and Hindley – a foundling from Liverpool he calls Heathcliff. Like Victoria, Catherine’s early childhood is characterized by the lack of sufficient parental guidance, having lost both parents while she is young. “A wild, wick slip,” Nelly Dean calls her, running wild on the moors with Heathcliff – with whom she develops a codependency. Catherine’s nature is calmed somewhat by the civilizing force of first Fanny, her brother’s wife, and then the Lintons (Brontë 55). Catherine sustains an injury while she and Heathcliff trespass to spy on the Lintons, and she is forced to recoup at Thrushcross Grange under their refined influences. She returns to Wuthering Heights with a new frock and manner that distances her from her childhood companion Heathcliff. Through the new clothing and genteel company, Catherine is introduced to the societal and domestic role she is expected to fill. Eventually, she agrees to marry Edgar Linton, who, “handsome, and young, and cheerful, and rich,” comes from a “wealthy, respectable” house (85). This comes about as a result of her knowledge of these roles, although she confesses to Nelly that “In whichever place the soul lives… [she] is convinced [she] is wrong” (85). She describes a dream in which,
“... heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back
to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath
on top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.” (86)
Gilbert and Gubar explore the concept of heaven and hell in Wuthering Heights, especially as it pertains to societal roles for women. The authors argue that the novel functions as a sort of response to Milton’s Paradise Lost, although with a reversal of the typical “fall” narrative. In this case, Catherine “falls” from what society might deem as hell – her wild childhood and androgynous “wholeness” with Heathcliff – into the established heaven of female grace and experience. Noting the historic difficulties in defining the exact genre the novel falls into, Gilbert and Gubar explore Wuthering Heights as a myth, specifically one that deals with female origins in culture and society. It particularly does this through Catherine’s loss and transition from her aforementioned childhood connections to her subsequent education through Frances and the Lintons. However, just as Catherine’s dream portends, this “heaven” of apparent domestic stability “does not seem to be [her] home” (Brontë 86).
The attempts to curb Catherine’s childhood wildness have not been entirely successful, causing her to adopt a sort of double character, as Nelly notes. A large aspect of this double life is her relationship with Heathcliff, who does not exist neatly within the bounds of the domestic sphere. His social status is ambiguous, as he was treated by the old Mr. Earnshaw as a son, but degraded to a laborer by Hindley. His heritage also alienates him. Although of ambiguous racial background, Heathcliff is consistently identified throughout the novel as an “other” in society. The Lintons speculate that he is a “gipsy,” “a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway” (Brontë 62). Beyond this, however, he is equated by various characters with something monstrous or devilish, and seems to have a corrupting influence on the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights after his mysterious return. Even Catherine, his friend, warns Isabella Linton that Heathcliff is “a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man” (104). Meyer argues that Brontë left his background deliberately ambiguous, as he is able to represent, alongside Catherine, the “resistant energies” of those “external to, subordinated to, marginalized by, or excluded from the British social order” (Meyer 102, 101).
It is through the relationship between the two that Catherine can express her “wildness” beyond the boundaries of the domestic role she stepped into when she agreed to marry Edgar. As she proclaims to Nelly, Heathcliff is “more myself than I am” (Brontë 86). His return, and the subsequent conflict between her two worlds, leads Catherine to a crisis of self. Secluding herself in her room and refusing food, Catherine lies on the edge of illness and madness until she is unable to recognize her own reflection in a mirror, thinking it a ghost. Nelly attempts to comfort her with assurances that “It was yourself, Mrs. Linton,” however these do not placate her (Brontë 121). In fact, Catherine seems even further disturbed at this thought, replying “Myself!…. It’s true then; that’s dreadful!” (121). Through this interaction, we become aware that, just as her reflection is unfamiliar to her, Catherine does not recognize the woman she has become. Rather, she longs for the wildness of her life at Wuthering Heights, begging Nelly to open the window and “let [her] have one breath” of the wind blowing in from the moor (121).
Eagleton notes that this scene reflects the central conflicts of Brontë’s novel, which stem from the central conflict of authentic, natural self versus civilization and social privilege. He analyzes the novel in terms of the power dynamics of those who are within or outside of domestic structure. It is within Catherine’s character that these conflicts are personified, as she struggles between the knowledge of her expected place within societal norms – knowledge gained from the cultivation of Fanny and the Lintons – and the wild passions of her childhood. The tension between these conflicts is expressed in how Catherine disrupts the boundaries of the civilized, domestic role she is expected to fulfill. She attempts to open up the enclosed household at Thrushcross Grange to Heathcliff, an entity who does not fit within the domestic structure. When this fails, her dissatisfaction begets violent passion, similar to Dacre’s Victoria. However, unlike Victoria, in Catherine this violence is directed inward, rather than outward, manifesting in the final illness that Nelly considers, at least partially, to be self-inflicted.
Von Sneidern interestingly draws a link between Heathcliff’s origin and the involvement of Liverpool in the trans-Atlantic slave trade during the novel’s set period. Although by the mid 19th century English sentiment was generally set against the institution of slavery, which was abolished in the decades before Brontë’s novel was published, the idea of Anglo-Saxon superiority and a kind of racial mythology was still prevalent. Von Sneidern argues that Brontë engages with this through Heathcliff’s entrance into Wuthering Heights, which upsets the “social equilibrium” and domestic structure of the household (175). Importantly, however, Brontë (through Catherine) does not seem to attribute Heathcliff’s baseness to his nature, but to his harsh and degrading upbringing under Hindley, a thought which “questions the very concept of race” and the various pseudo-scientific justifications for an Anglo-Saxon racial superiority (177).
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CULTIVATING WOMEN: EDUCATION VS. PASSION IN THE GOTHIC NOVEL
Both Dacre and Brontë engage with the question of how cultivation or training affects their heroine, a concept which reflects the larger societal question of the education of women. Both authors would doubtless have been familiar with Mary Wollstonecraft’s controversial Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792. In her treatise, Wollstonecraft reflects on the intersection of education and virtue. The current state of education, she claims, breeds women with no real or “conscious virtue,” as the primary focus is on manners and beauty – that is, what will attract and secure a marriage. This is a particular concern for the future of Enlightened society, as these women are the ones who will guide and train the next generation. According to Wollstonecraft, the solution to this issue is that women be given the opportunity for equal education with men in order to develop their reason and virtue.
Engagement with Wollstonecraft’s ideas can be found within each of the novels. In Zofloya, for instance, Laurina’s failure to cultivate virtue in her children, as is the duty of an Enlightenment mother, leads to disastrous results in the lives of the next generation. The utter lack of moral guidance afforded Victoria leads her to adopt only the semblance of gentility, concealing her murderous passions. As Hoeveler notes, the novel also reflects what Wollstonecraft presents as fears and perceived threats of the new ideals of the civilized, Enlightened bourgeois, in the form of the sexually predatory, “uncivilized, aristocratic woman” Victoria exemplifies (Hoeveler 148). In Wuthering Heights, Catherine is exposed to some civiling influences, but these are closer to the surface level education of manners and finery that Wollstonecraft warns against than a true development of moral reason. The insufficiency of such training becomes evident in Catherine’s crisis of self and subsequent death, particularly as this renders her unable to provide guidance and training to her own daughter, Catherine the younger.
The works of Brontë and Dacre depart, in some ways, from the tradition of the Female Gothic. Rather than the innocent heroine who triumphs over her enemy, the protagonists they present often give in to their natural “wildest passions,” disrupting the boundaries of Enlightened society, and those of the domestic sphere in particular (Dacre). Both Victoria and Catherine express the desire to push against these boundaries through their relationship with a man who complicates a strictly delineated social structure, whether it be racial or socioeconomic, as Zofloya and Heathcliff come to represent the most untamed, even violent aspects of the heroines’ characters. The ultimate treatment of these heroines makes clear the importance of cultivating reason and virtue over natural passions, as to do otherwise would be a threat to an Enlightened society. However, Dacre is significantly more heavy-handed in her censure than Brontë is, leaving her readers with a moral warning and a heroine who suffers the ultimate punishment of eternal damnation. Brontë seems more sympathetic to her heroine, and Catherine’s death is of more ambiguous meaning than strictly punitive. Although Catherine’s attempt to reconcile both the civilized and natural aspects of her character results in madness and death, she continues to haunt the story into the next generation. This seems to imply a more complicated critique than was made in Zofloya, revealing the distinct, shifting attitudes towards the role of women who disrupt the social boundary.
Hoeveler even proposes that Zofloya could be read as “a virtual parody of Wollstonecraft’s works” (145).
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REFERENCES
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford UP, 1987.
Botting, Fred. Gothic. 2nd ed., Taylor & Francis, 2014.
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights, edited by Linda H. Peterson, Yale UP, 2003.
Dacre, Charlotte. Zofloya; or, The Moor, edited by Adriana Craciun, Broadview Press, 1997.
Eagleton, Terry. “Myths of Power: A Marxist Study on Wuthering Heights.” Wuthering Heights: Complete Authoritative Text, edited by Linda H. Peterson, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003, pp. 394-410.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. “Looking Oppositely: Emily Brontë’s Bible of Hell.” The Madwoman in the Attic. Yale UP, 1979.
Hoeveler, Diane Long. Gothic Feminism: the professionalization of gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës. The Pennsylvania State UP, 1998.
Lim, Jane. “‘Open House’: Hospitality and Decentered Subjects in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya or The Moor (1806).” Eighteenth-Century Life, vol. 48, no. 3, September 2024, pp. 120-142.
Meyer, Susan. “‘Your Father Was Emperor of China, and Your Mother an Indian Queen’: Reverse Imperialism in Wuthering Heights.” Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction, Cornell UP, 1996, pp. 96-125.
Moers, Ellen. “Female Gothic.” Literary Women. Oxford UP, 1977.
Nayar, Pramod K. “The Interracial Sublime: Gender and Race in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya.” Multidisciplinary Journal of Gender, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 233-254. doi:10.4471/generos.2013.28.
von Sneidern, Maja-Lisa. “Wuthering Heights and the Liverpool Slave Trade.” EHL, vol. 62, no.1, John Hopkins UP, 1995, pp. 171-196.
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