Amelia Beauclerc | |
---|---|
Born | 1 January 1790 |
Died | 1 March 1820 | (aged 30)
Pen name | Emma de Lisle (misascribed) |
Occupation | Novelist |
Language | English |
Genre |
Amelia Beauclerc (1 January 1790 – 1 March 1820) was a British Gothic novelist.
Beauclerc's life has been described as "invisible."[1]
It has taken time to establish a complete bibliography for Beauclerk.[2] Her first two novels, Eva of Cambria, or, The Fugitive Daughter (1810) and Ora and Juliet, or, Influence of First Principles (1811), were published by mistake under the name "Emma de Lisle," the nom de plume of another novelist, Emma Parker.[3] Beauclerc's next four novels were published "by the author of," but her final two novels were clearly published under her own name.
Six of Beauclerc's eight novels were published by the Minerva Press, famous for their sentimental and Gothic titles. Her interest was more in the former; one commentator called her novels "sham Gothic" because they focused more on sentiment than on more thrilling genre elements.[4] In this regard, Beauclerc followed the example of Ann Radcliffe and the tradition of the "female Gothic."
During her lifetime, Beauclearc received mixed reviews, from the utterly damning[5] to the moderately approving.[6] In the twentieth century, while some of her work has been called "predictably gothic, heavy-handed, or punatively moral" her "best work" has been judged "impressive, focusing on relations between the sexes."[7]