Clara Reeve

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Standard Name: Reeve, Clara
Birth Name: Clara Reeve
Pseudonym: C. R.
Pseudonym: C. R--ve
CR , late-eighteenth-century novelist, wrote both gothic and contemporary novels (the first being her best known), as well as poetry and a pioneer work of serious criticism about the novel form. At the end of her life she reckoned her published output at twenty-one volumes, not counting pamphlets.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Oval portrait of Clara Reeve, drawn by A. H. Tourrier, etched by Dammam. She is seen from the waist up, arms folded, standing beside a plant in a tall pot. She is wearing a simple striped dress with darker cloth crossed over her chest, a printed shawl around her shoulders, and a white cap her head. Her name is written beneath.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
death Edmund Spenser
Spenser's early women readers who were also poets seem to have included An Collins and Alicia D'Anvers . Later women writers in English either found him useful for raising the status of the romance genre...
Family and Intimate relationships Susan Smythies
Of Susan's identified siblings (apart from those who died young) William was born in November 1722, Humphrey or Humphry in January 1724, Ann in February 1725, Elizabeth in August 1727; from the first marriage there...
Friends, Associates Mary Scott
MS was probably a friend from an early age of the dissenting hymn-writer Anne Steele , who lived not very far away and who was a generation older. They spent much time together in 1773...
Intertextuality and Influence Mrs F. C. Patrick
The narrative is at first somewhat flat-footed in its insistence that this is not a novel, but it acquires further flavour whenever the old gentleman telling it becomes self-referential. His daughter, he says, acts the...
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Singer Rowe
Her narrative, in iambic couplets, was influenced, as most biblical re-tellings were, both by Milton 's Paradise Lost and by Matthew Prior 's Solomon (which elsewhere she praised in verse).
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Singer Rowe
When Reeve later retold the Charoba story in The Progress of Romance, 1785, it was as a specimen of the genre, with implicit reference to some of Rowe's critical points. William Howitt (born in...
Leisure and Society Henrietta Sykes
In her diary for 1813 recorded New Year celebrations with much conviviality: she and her guests, she wrote, danced like lunatics. She also listed good novels she had recently read. They included The School for...
Literary responses Ann Radcliffe
This novel marks AR 's first big success. It drew widespread critical acclaim.
Norton, Rictor. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. Leicester University Press, 1999.
83
The Critical Review praised it and likened the author to Clara Reeve (while making an issue of the fact that, though...
Literary responses Susannah Dobson
The Critical began its notice by praising the extensive research of the original and by condemning its prolixity, a fault now remedied by SD , who, it says, has told Petrarch's story in a manner...
Literary responses Eliza Haywood
In the Monthly Review, Ralph Griffiths passed a judgement which was inflected against Betsy Thoughtless by issues of gender. He guessed that the author was female because of the novel's attention to matters of...
Literary responses Elizabeth Singer Rowe
In a later generation Anna Letitia Barbauld followed Hertford and Carter in celebrating ESR her in poetry. Such different figures as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Clara Reeve endorsed her. She had a huge following...
Publishing Elizabeth Bonhote
She published the work in two volumes, with William Lane of the future Minerva Press ,
McLeod, Deborah. The Minerva Press. University of Alberta, 1997.
4
and for the first time put her name (Mrs. Bonhote of Bungay, Suffolk) on the title-page...
Reception Eliza Haywood
He said nothing of EH 's writings, but referred disparagingly (and, for later scholars, misleadingly) to the Kirkall portrait. Curll 's Compleat Key to the Dunciad, published ten days after Pope's poem, made the...
Residence Elizabeth Bonhote
After spending most of her lifetime at Bungay (at this date a centre of genteel culture, possessing a theatre, spa services, and fashionable assemblies, and a grammar school where a brother of Clara Reeve had...
Textual Features Ann Radcliffe
It is set, as the title implies, in the Highlands of Scotland. The hero, Osbert, is a Scots peasant who proves to be of noble birth. The novel stands squarely in the gothic tradition...

Timeline

19 June 1725
Dorothy Stanley , née Milborne, published by subscription Sir Philip Sidney 's Arcadia Moderniz'd, in four books (coinciding with the thirteenth edition of the original romance).
English Short Title Catalogue.
1769
The Town and Country Magazine; or Universal Repository of Knowledge, Instruction, and Entertainment began publication; it ran until 1795.
1805
George Nicholson compiled and published at Poughnill near Ludlow in ShropshireThe Advocate and Friend of Woman, an anthology of excerpts.
1814
John Colin Dunlop published The History of Fiction: Being a Critical Account of the Most Celebrated Prose Works of Fiction, from the Earliest Greek Romances to the Novels of the Present Age.