Gaston de Blondeville (Valancourt Classics) [Paperback]

Ann Radcliffe (Author), Frances Chiu (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 17, 2006

King Henry III is holding court at Kenilworth. Festivities abound, wine flows copiously, and spirits are high as the King and his subjects prepare to celebrate the nuptials of Sir Gaston de Blondeville. But the joyous mood is interrupted when a merchant, Hugh Woodreeve, comes distraught before the King to demand justice. His kinsman, he claims, was murdered, by the very man the King has come to honour -- Gaston de Blondeville! Suspecting a conspiracy against Gaston, yet obliged to hold a trial to determine the truth of the allegations, Henry imprisons Woodreeve in a tower while awaiting a hearing. Meanwhile, sinister forces are at work, represented by an evil abbot, who will stop at nothing to ensure the truth behind Woodreeve's claims is never revealed. As the trial unfolds and the danger mounts for both Woodreeve and Gaston, a mysterious figure will come from beyond the grave to elucidate the horrible mystery! The only one of Radcliffe's novels to feature a real ghost, Gaston de Blondeville was published posthumously in 1826. This edition, the first-ever scholarly edition of the novel, features a new introduction by Frances Chiu, uncoding the novel's long-hidden political, historical, and religious contexts. A wealth of supplementary materials, including excerpts from other primary texts and the complete text of contemporary reviews, is also provided to enhance modern readers' understanding of the novel's themes.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A scholarly edition with a selection of contemporary reviews and extracts from various key reformist players, Gaston de Blondeville supports the recent opinion that Radcliffe's narrative politics are more radical than has previously been considered. -- Times Literary Supplement, June 1, 2007

About the Author

Ann Radcliffe was born Ann Ward. She married William Radcliffe. They had no children, and with her husband's encouragement, she wrote fiction to amuse herself. Her "Gothic" novels, which were extremely popular, tend to involve innocent but heroic young women who find themselves in gloomy, mysterious castles at the mercy of complicated men. They influenced Sir Walter Scott and were parodied by Jane Austen. Radcliffe died in 1823 pneumonia. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 300 pages
• Publisher: Valancourt Books; 1st Valancourt Books Ed edition (April 17, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 097778410X
• ISBN-13: 978-0977784103
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,884,075 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mrs. Radcliffe: First Lady of Historical Fiction, July 11, 2007

By 

Tyler R. Tichelaar "Superior Book Promotions ... (Marquette, MI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Gaston de Blondeville (Valancourt Classics) (Paperback)

Valancourt Books' recent publication of Mrs. Radcliffe's Gaston de Blondeville is a publication long overdue. The novel, originally published in 1826, three years after the mistress of the Gothic's death, was actually written by her in 1803, but then suppressed by her from publication. The general belief is that she disowned the novel, thinking it inferior to her other work; literary historians have also claimed that readers agreed and greeted its publication with little enthusiasm. The primary reason usually given for why it is inferior is that it is the only one of Radcliffe's Gothic novels where she chose to use a real ghost rather than explain what appeared to be supernatural occurrences. The general reader, and especially the student of Gothic and historical fiction, should be allowed to judge the matter for himself and now that Valancourt Books has republished Gaston de Blondeville, that decision can be made.

Gaston de Blondeville, while admittedly not as full of chills and suspense as The Mysteries of Udolpho or The Italian, is a remarkable novel in Radcliffe's canon. It marks a noted departure from her earlier novels, and in many ways, it displays her growth and restraint as an author. Considering all her previous novels were published between the time she was twenty-five and thirty-three, a remarkably young age for someone to write three of the greatest Gothic novels of all time, as well as a couple inferior ones, it is not surprising that Radcliffe sought to move in a new direction in her work. Gaston de Blondeville was the beginning of her growth in that new direction, and had she written another like it, readers may have had a real treat in an even greater Radcliffe.

My only criticism of Valancourt Books' edition of Gaston de Blondeville--which is filled with a superb collection of secondary sources and an impressive scholarly introduction by Frances Chiu to reflect the historical and political influences of the French Revolution upon the novel--is that no attempt is made in these supplementary materials to explain why Radcliffe made this departure from her past use of rational explanations for supposed supernatural occurrences. I believe that departure is the big question that must be answered about this novel, especially since Radcliffe was otherwise striving to be more realistic from a historical standpoint.

Despite what is typically said about Gaston de Blondeville by literary historians, the six contemporary reviews provided in this edition are largely favorable. In her introduction, Frances Chiu quotes these reviews to argue that literary critics condemned the novel, but in truth, only one review is solidly negative while the rest express great enthusiasm for a new work by Mrs. Radcliffe. Chiu quotes La Belle Assemblee as saying "it is without the lofty pretensions of some of Mrs. Radcliffe's earlier productions, and incapable of exciting an equal intenseness of interest" but Chiu fails to quote what comes directly after: "it will not in the slightest degree detract from the fame of her" and "it will be read with great satisfaction by every reader of taste." Scots Magazine was pleased that the novel does not include so much of her poetry which is not remarkable at all, and overall feels the novel is an improvement on her earlier work because "She avoided long particulars of rural scenery, and tedious trackings of the agitated mind, from one terrible or sorrowful imagination to another." In fact, the only review that is truly negative is the Monthly Review, which does find parts of the work to praise but chiefly objects to its use of the supernatural.

Why Radcliffe decided to include supernatural events as a reality has not been given a good explanation. Perhaps she felt the supernatural was more acceptable to the reading public by the earlier nineteenth century, nearly fifteen years after she wrote her first Gothic novel. While she may have been in competition with other Gothic writers, her contemporaries, such as Matthew Lewis in The Monk (1795) and William Godwin in St. Leon (1799), were not beyond using the supernatural as a possibility, so perhaps she need no longer provide rational explanations for supernatural events. Greater study is needed of how the view toward the supernatural changed and became acceptable in literature, especially during this period as the "Age of Reason" was replaced by the horrors of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.

What I find more remarkable about Gaston de Blondeville than Radcliffe's use of the supernatural is that it is one of the earliest historical fiction novels. Sir Walter Scott is often credited with being the first major writer of historical fiction, but historical fiction certainly has its roots in Gothic novels with their typically medieval settings. The difference between Gothic and historical fiction is the concentration on a much more realistic historical world. The Gothic typically sets its novels in a more vaguely historical period or avoids attention to historic detail. A key component to historical fiction is the depiction of historical events and historical personages in the background of the novel, such as the Battle of Culloden as the background to Scott's Waverley (1814). If that is true, then I would argue that Radcliffe is our first true female historical novelist since Gaston de Blondeville, although not published until 1826, was written in 1803, a full six years before Jane Porter's The Scottish Chiefs (1809), that tremendous novel about Sir William Wallace, and only three years after Godwin's St. Leon (1799) which only really attains historical fiction status due to its including the historical character of Bethlem Gabor in its pages. (Arguments have been made that Clara Reeve is the first female writer of historical fiction, but I don't feel her work is historically detailed enough to merit such a claim). Radcliffe is far more historically detailed than Godwin in her descriptions of the court of Henry III and in the details she provides of that age of chivalry, tournaments, and medieval monasteries. While her novel may not have had the influence on historical fiction that Scott's works did, and therefore, she may not be the mother of historical fiction, not having led to the birth of similar historical works, as she was for Gothic novels, she certainly is the aunt, who has been kept like a skeleton in the closet, while Gaston de Blondeville has been treated as if it were better not to be talked about it, lest it ruin the Mistress of Gothic Literature's good name.

I encourage all lovers of Gothic and historical fiction to read Gaston de Blondeville to make up their own minds. I personally find the novel a much more concise, controlled and mature work, and if not as fascinating and suspenseful as her previous works, one that deserves further attention. If Mrs. Radcliffe had written and published a couple more historical novels after Gaston de Blondeville, I have no doubt she would have rivaled Sir Walter Scott for his dominant place as a writer of historical fiction. As always, I commend Valancourt Books for preserving our literary heritage by printing such important and overlooked works of literature.

- Tyler R. Tichelaar, Ph.D. in British Literature, author of Iron Pioneers, The Queen City, and Superior Heritage. For MQT REVIEWS www.MarquetteFiction.com

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The only Radcliffe novel with a real ghost!, June 1, 2006

By 

Ryan S. Cagle - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Gaston de Blondeville (Valancourt Classics) (Paperback)

I am with the publisher, Valancourt Books, and wanted to post this description from the book's back cover, since Amazon has not done so:

King Henry III is holding court at Kenilworth. Festivities abound, wine flows copiously, and spirits are high as the King and his subjects prepare to celebrate the nuptials of Sir Gaston de Blondeville. But the joyous mood is interrupted when a merchant, Hugh Woodreeve, comes distraught before the King to demand justice. His kinsman, he claims, was murdered, by the very man the King has come to honour -- Gaston de Blondeville!
Suspecting a conspiracy against Gaston, yet obliged to hold a trial to determine the truth of the allegations, Henry imprisons Woodreeve in a tower while awaiting a hearing. Meanwhile, sinister forces are at work, represented by an evil abbot, who will stop at nothing to ensure the truth behind Woodreeve's claims is never revealed.
As the trial unfolds and the danger mounts for both Woodreeve and Gaston, a mysterious figure will come from beyond the grave to elucidate the horrible mystery!
The only one of Radcliffe's novels to feature a real ghost, Gaston de Blondeville was published posthumously in 1826. This edition, the first-ever scholarly edition of the novel, features a new introduction by Frances Chiu, uncoding the novel's long-hidden political, historical, and religious contexts. A wealth of supplementary materials, including excerpts from other primary texts and the complete text of contemporary reviews, is also provided to enhance modern readers' understanding of the novel's themes.