Clara Reeve

The Old English Baron: a Gothic Story Clara Reeve

Clara Reeve (1729 - 1807), novelist, born in Ipswich, England, was the author of several novels, of which only one is remembered; The Champion of Virtue, later known as The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story (1777), written in imitation of, or rivalry with, the Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, with which it has often been printed. Her novel noticeably influenced Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. She also wrote the epistolatory novel The School for Widows (1791). Her innovative history of prose fiction, The Progress of Romance (1785), can be regarded generally as a precursor to modern histories of the novel and specifically as upholding the tradition of female literary history heralded by Elizabeth Rowe and Susannah Dobson. Other works by her: The Phoenix (1772), Two Mentors (1783), The Exiles (1788), Memoirs of Sir Roger de Clarendon (1793), and Destination (1799).