Bellefleur is part of a trilogy of Gothic romances: Bellefleur (1980), A Bloodsmoor Romance (1983), and Mysteries of Winterthurn (1986). A Bloodsmoor Romance, set in nineteenth-century New England, is the most self-indulgent of the three. A tedious, elderly female narrates, in fits and starts, the chronicle of the five Zinn sisters, the first of whom, Deirdre, is abducted in a balloon at the beginning of the novel. The style is verbose, disjointed, and parenthetical, liberally sprinkled with quotations from bad nineteenth-century verse and prose documents of equally dismal style. It supposedly deals with the lot of the nineteenth-century woman, but in such a fantastic and allusive way that it appears as if Oates were taking a.....
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