Le Baron Illuminé.

£16,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Very Rare. OCLC records copies of this French translation at the BnF and University of Virginia only. First published in Portsmouth, NH as Julia, and the Illuminated Baron . “By a Lady of Massachusetts” in 1800. Also published in London by Row in 1800 (advertised in The Monthly Magazine (1800) p. 449 - the first London edition survives in only one copy at the Lilly library .) The present edition is the first to have a -suitably gothic - frontispiece illustration showing two women opening a coffin by lamplight in a vault. The very rare French translation of Sally Wood’s important “neglected” first novel - the first gothic novel written by a woman in America which uses “every Radcliffean signature in the book whilst refusing to conform to a strictly American nationalist framework.” The novel uses the gothic form to produce a “thinly veiled conservative allegory about the evils of philosophical radicalism on social and political stability that echoes contemporary conspiracy theories regarding the Illuminati’s plans for global domination” in a way which feels deeply prescient of the anxious state of global politics in the 21st-century. “Set in France at the outbreak of the Revolution, Julia and the Illuminated Baron follows the fate of the French orphan Julia, who despite being without name or property is adopted as ward to the beneficent Countess de Launa. Julia falls in love with Englishman Francis Colwort, but before the two can marry, great misadventures befall both. Colwort

• Binding: Hardcover

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