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language: English
country: UK
year: 1789
form: novel
genre(s): gothic, romance
dates read: 12.5.23-19.5.23
decided to read Ann Radcliffe’s The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, with an eye to potentially teaching it (I think not, at this point). it’s very…hm…overwrought. certainly proto-gothic in its (over)sensibility: everyone is constantly being overcome with emotion (particularly but not exclusively the women), the main characters spend a bunch of time in the ancient tunnels under the castles, there’s a villainous and sexually threatening evil Baron AND a secretly villainous and sexually threatening evil Count, etc.
I ended up actually reading most of it aloud to [redacted], which was a bit challenging because Radcliffe occasionally used commas where she should have used semicolons, and vice versa, and also there are occasionally what I’m pretty sure would have been malapropisms or typos even in the eighteenth century, all of which makes it difficult at times to read aloud. also there are parts where it jumps back and forth between perspectives in a way that’s not clear — we had to stop for a few minutes last night in the middle of chapter 10 to untangle who was who in the scene in question. also that fucking 16-line “sonnet” lmao.
notwithstanding that, it was reasonably readable and, for all the overwrought-ness, reasonably enjoyable: the young Earl Osbert sets out to avenge the murder of his father by the evil Baron Malcolm and ends up captured; his right hand man, a peasant (ostensibly) named Alleyn, rescues Osbert and Osbert’s sister Mary several times from the depradations of the Baron and his minions; the Baron is overthrown; Mary and Alleyn fall in forbidden love, but finally it’s revealed that Alleyn is actually the Baron’s (ambiguously murdered) brother’s long-lost son and heir to his estate. there’s some other stuff, too (like the villainous and sexually threatening evil Count), but that’s the bulk of it. it’s kind of wacky, overall.
but it also suffers from its all-too-gothic reiteration of class boundaries and normative heterosexuality: of course Alleyn-the-peasant simply cannot marry Mary — that can only happen once he’s revealed to be Philip Malcolm, the long-lost rightful Baron. class is an uncrossable and absolute boundary, aristocracy is a natural and inherent characteristic, etc., etc.
the one other highlight was a surprising moment of almost-accuracy, when the Earl escapes from the Baron and returns to Malcolm and, for a moment, Malcolm believes the Earl isn’t actually present but rather one of “the traditionary visions of his nation”, presumably an early reference to an dà shealladh, one manifestation of which is visions of (living) people who are absent but — in the moment of the vision — strongly wishing they were with the people having the vision. that was about the only “accurate” bit of Gaelic/Highland culture, though. but that’s not really surprising for a novel whose first sentence is literally:
On the north-east coast of Scotland, in the most romantic part of the Highlands, stood the Castle of Athlin; an edifice built on the summit of a rock whose base was in the sea.
moods: adventurous, emotional, wacky