Shocking readers was likely Dacre’s goal, however. One of the original reviews lambasted Dacre, saying the “female mind” should not have the capacity to conjure narratives with such a flagrant “exhibition of wantonness of harlotry.” With the aid of a magic potion, she even accomplishes the rarely-examined act of male rape. Readers were scandalized in its day for the graphic depiction of female lust, including one diabolical villainess who commits mass murder as a means to sleeping with her husband’s brother. Generally, Zofloya is far more interested in the sexuality of women than men. Then there’s the young Leonardo who thinks himself above temptation, but soon finds himself the love slave of a nineteenth century dominatrix.

He has the very specific goal of using his charms to wreck happy homes. This includes a philandering man with a fetish for married women. Much of the drama arises from megalomania in the characters' brains. Zofloya is a pre-Freud gothic novel first published in 1806, but it often seems informed by modern theories of sexual psychology. The introduction to this edition, the first for nearly 200 years, examines why Zofloya deserves to be read alongside established Gothic classics as the highly original work of an intriguing and unconventional writer.

Contradicting idealized stereotypes of women's writing, the novel's portrait of indulged desire, gratuitous cruelty, and monumental self-absorption retains considerable power to disturb. A minor scandal on its first publication, and a significant influence on Byron and Shelley, Zofloya has been unduly neglected. The novel's most daring aspect is its anatomy of Victoria's intense sexual attraction to her Moorish servant Zofloya that transgresses taboos both of class and race. Charlotte Dacre's narrative deftly displays her heroine's movement from the vitalized position of Ann Radcliffe's heroines to a fully conscious commitment to vice that goes beyond that of `Monk' Lewis's deluded Ambrosio. The novel follows Victoria's progress from spoilt daughter of indulgent aristocrats, through a period of abuse and captivity, to a career of deepening criminality conducted under Satan's watchful eye. 'Few venture as thou hast in the alarming paths of sin.' This is the final judgement of Satan on Victoria di Loredani, the heroine of Zofloya, or The Moor (1806), a tale of lust, betrayal, and multiple murder set in Venice in the last days of the fifteenth century.

Zofloya book