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degree that it encourages socially decadent trends by causing readers to mistake fiction
for reality, and to associate pleasure with irrational, immoral, or improbable characters
and narratives” (54). On the other hand, by echoing Sidney’s argument regarding the
historic value of literature in An Apology of Poetry, Clara Reeve argues that romance can
be beneficial to its audience by depicting a more “purified” account of history: “History
represents human nature as it is in real life … Romance displays only the amiable side of
the picture; it shews the pleasing features, and throws a veil over the blemishes” (The Old
English Baron, 3). Gamer suggests that her defense “represents an attempt to rescue
romance from its stigma as a pernicious genre by prescribing to it the masculinity of
antiquarian history and the same strictures of socially acceptable femininity—
temperance, sense, and social duty—that constrain women writers in the period” (58).
Similarly, in what could be correlated with New Historicism’s argument that history is in
fact story-telling, Maria Edgeworth has argued that history was just another kind of
romance and that romances, through the pleasure they confer, encourage readers who are
not particularly well-read or inclined to read, to read more (vii). As will be explained
below, the historical contributions of the genre—and the gender implications it carries—
will also play a significant role in the reception of the Gothic novel. But most
importantly, it is only through the recognition of the validity of the novel as historical
account that in the following century, historical novels by the likes of Sir Walter Scott
would triumph as an accepted genre of high cultural production.
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With the appearance of the Gothic, however, the critics’ condescending stance
towards romance was amplified as a result of both its increasing popularity and its use of
the supernatural as a source of sensationalism. First, the defense of romance based on its