Zofloya

Zofloya; or, The Moor: A Romance of the Fifteenth Century, often shortened to Zofloya, is an 1806 English Gothic novel by Charlotte Dacre under the nom de plume Rosa Matilda. It was her second novel. Zofloya was published in three parts, and later collected into a single volume. At the time of publication, the novel was heavily criticised for its provocative subject matter, especially its religious and racial themes. Its focus on female sexuality was also criticised as inappropriate, with one contemporary reviewer noting the novel possessed "an exhibition of wantonness of harlotry". Despite reprints in 1928 and 1974, Zofloya was largely forgotten for nearly two centuries until its recovery in the 1990s by feminist scholars, which led to two professional editions being published in 1997. Since then it has attracted scholarly attention, and become a staple work of Gothic curricula. Notable for its subversion of the female Gothic, in particular the novel's heroine, Victoria di Loredani, who challenges female Gothic archetypes of the period, it has been called "a significant departure from the more familiar tradition of women's Gothic writing."