A Supplement — Gaston de Blondeville

Abstract

As a postscript, as it were, to the last chapter’s consideration of Radcliffe’s better-known works, this chapter offers a re-reading of a text that is in certain respects supplemental to Radcliffe’s own writing career, Glaston de Blondeville. This text, I will argue, illuminates from a variety of fresh perspectives the problematics of textuality, fictivity, origin and authority in literature and law — the problematics, as I have theorised it, of the Gothic and/in the rule of law. Published posthumously in 1826 and rarely studied critically alongside the earlier romances, Gaston de Blondeville stands in uneasy relation to modern ‘laws’ of literature. The extensive introduction to the 1826 edition — comprised of a long critical essay followed by extracts from Radcliffe’s travel journals — appears to acknowledge as much. Interestingly, it posits Radcliffe’s earlier writings as authenticating supplements to this final romance as it seeks to establish Radcliffe’s literary pedigree as a preface to, as a justification for, the posthumous publication of a text that the author herself did not intend to make public. This edition, then, marks a significant stage in the incorporation of Radcliffe into a modern literary economy which, as Derrida argues, places the text and the writer ‘before the law’.¹ This legal and literary economy circulates texts and authors as commodities legitimised through notions of originality and authenticity that define texts legally within the public domain.