The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (review)

often equate with the sentimental, epistolary novel. Finally, Hoock-Demarle successfully avoids the tendency to label writers according to period. In doing so she usefully sets the work of a writer such as Sophie von LaRoche in a wider context. In assessing the weaknesses of this study, it is important to consider for whom the study was intended. It appears from the virtual absence of a discussion of secondary literature on women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that Hoock-Demarle intends her study more for generalists than for specialists. Moreover, as titles and quotations in German are translated into French, it seems clear that her study is primarily directed to a French audience. Finally, the bibliography consists of a relatively short list of general secondary sources; it offers an extensive bibliographic listing of contemporary texts on the French Revolution, however, as well as of memoirs, correspondence, and novels by women between 1790 and 1816, information extremely useful to any scholar of women's literary history.