Frontmatter

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents ix
3. Preface xiii
4. Introduction 1
5. PART I Reading The Mysterious Mother
6. 1 The Mystery of The Mysterious Mother: Textual Lives and Afterlives 9
7. 2 The Mysterious Orphan: Dramatizing the Betrayal of the Child 23
8. 3 • Misreading The Mysterious Mother: Motherhood and Religious Feeling 37
9. 4 • “Some demon rides in th’ air”: Lightning and the Problem of the Supernatural in Walpole’s Second Gothic 48
10. 5 • Horace Walpole’s Crypto-Catholicism, the Gothic, and The Mysterious Mother 62
11. 6 • Defiance of Authority and the Visionary Power of Negation in The Mysterious Mother 77
12. PART II Staging The Mysterious Mother
13. 7 • Wilful Walpole: Performing Publication and The Mysterious Mother 91
14. 8 • Family Dramas: The Mysterious Mother and the Eighteenth-Century Incest Play 103
15. 9 • “The beautiful negligence of a gentleman”: Horace Walpole and Amateur Theatricals 113
16. 10 • “I beg you would keep it under lock and key”: The Mystery of the 1821 Mysterious Mother Performances 124
17. PART III The Yale Performance
18. 11 • Abridged Version of The Mysterious Mother 137
19. 12 • Abridging Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother 168
20. 13 • Staging The Mysterious Mother 174
21. PART IV “This copy is to be kept in the Beauclerc- closet to explain Lady Di Beauclerc’s Drawings. H.W. ”
22. Facsimile of Horace Walpole’s Copy of the 1768 Strawberry Hill Edition 183
23. 14 • The Beauclerk Closet Drawings: Seven Illustrations of The Mysterious Mother 329
24. Contributors 341
25. Acknowledgments 343
26. Index 347