SOURCE: Hoeveler, Diane Long. “Gendering the Civilizing Process: The Case of Charlotte Smith's Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle.” In Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës, pp. 27-50. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998.

In the following excerpt, Hoeveler discusses Emmeline as an important text in the establishment of the female gothic novel tradition.

This desire of being always women, is the very consciousness that degrades the sex.

—Mary Wollstonecraft

I

In 1753, the British Parliament passed the Hardwicke Act, a law that was designed to prevent the clandestine or forced marriages of heiresses who were apparently believed to be so besieged by mercenary bourgeois suitors that the law had to step in to protect them. As Lawrence Stone has observed, the aristocracy at this time was so concerned with the fine points of passing on their property that they became...