Author: DACRE (Charlotte):
Title: Hours of Solitude. A Collection of Original Poems, Now First Published. By Charlote Dacre, better known by the name of Rosa Matilda, The Second Edition.
Description: London: Printed by D. M. Shury...For Hughes...and Ridgway, 1806 2 volumes in 1. 8vo, 184 x 111, pp. [viii], 136; [ii], 140, including half-title for volume 1, engrave portrait frontispiece of author, by Mackenzie after J. Buck, contemporary lightly speckled calf, spine ornately gilt, dark green morocco label; front joint very slightly cracked, corners worn, but a good to very good copy The author asserts on the title-page that she was better know as Rosa Matilda, but even Charlotte Dacre is misleading. Her birth name was Charlotte Byrne [née King], (1782?-1825), "the daughter of John King, born Jacob Rey (c. 1753–1823), a moneylender and radical writer well known in London society.... In 1798 Charlotte King published with her sister Sophia [see Fortnum, Sophia 1781, 1805] a volume of Gothic verses, Trifles of Helicon, and dedicated it to her bankrupt father to show 'the education you have afforded us has not been totally lost'. The reappearance of poems from this volume in Hours of Solitude (1805), published under the pseudonym Charlotte Dacre, confirms the identity between Dacre and King; the pen-name was probably designed to suggest aristocratic connections. She also wrote verses for the Morning Post and Morning Herald under the name Rosa Matilda, perhaps after the demonic lover in Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796); Hours of Solitude had for a frontispiece a darkly glamorous portrait of herself as Rosa Matilda. The poems, full of Gothic passions and imagery, briefly influenced Byron (Hours of Idleness, 1807) though in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809, ll. 755–62) he would scorn 'the lovely ROSA's prose in masquerade'. Also in 1805 she published The Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer, a Gothic tale of sexual repression and misbehaviour. In the preface Dacre claims the book was written at the age of eighteen and left untouched for three years during journeys abroad. The British Critic for December 1805 (p. 671) called it 'a very fine, sentimental, and improbable story written in turgid and affected language … The moral, however, is good, for it teaches the mischief which arises from the neglect and violation of social duties'ODNB)." was published in the previous year Gothic Women: Year of Gothic Women. An interdisciplinary project devoted to spotlighting undervalued and understudied women writers (online)). Summers, Gothic Bib., p. 34.

Keywords: poetry women literature


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