Very Rare. OCLC records copies of this French translation at the BnF and University of Virginia only. First published in Portsmouth, NH as Julia, and the Illuminated Baron. “By a Lady of Massachusetts” in 1800. Also published in London by Row in 1800 (advertised in The Monthly Magazine (1800) p. 449 - the first London edition survives in only one copy at the Lilly library.) The present edition is the first to have a -suitably gothic - frontispiece illustration showing two women opening a coffin by lamplight in a vault.
The very rare French translation of Sally Wood’s important “neglected” first novel - the first gothic novel written by a woman in America which uses “every Radcliffean signature in the book whilst refusing to conform to a strictly American nationalist framework.” The novel uses the gothic form to produce a “thinly veiled conservative allegory about the evils of philosophical radicalism on social and political stability that echoes contemporary conspiracy theories regarding the Illuminati’s plans for global domination” in a way which feels deeply prescient of the anxious state of global politics in the 21st-century.
“Set in France at the outbreak of the Revolution, Julia and the Illuminated Baron follows the fate of the French orphan Julia, who despite being without name or property is adopted as ward to the beneficent Countess de Launa. Julia falls in love with Englishman Francis Colwort, but before the two can marry, great misadventures befall both. Colwort sails to America and after a time in Boston is shipwrecked and rescued by George Washington before finally returning, only to be imprisoned in revolutionary Paris. Meanwhile, Julia is arrested in a case of mistaken identity and brought to Spain as prisoner of state, then upon release is kidnapped and held captive in a castle by the villainous Baron de Launa, a member of the Illuminati and the Countess’s nephew. Upon escape she is reduced to desperate poverty before being reunited with the Countess and learning her real identity. Capping the climax of amazing coincidence, Julia is revealed to be the niece of the Countess, and the cousin of the recently freed Colwort (who it turns out was the Countess’s long lost son), and the half-sister of the evil Baron, who we learn was the one who murdered Julia’s mother, and who by the end of the novel has died alone in his castle, hopeless of salvation in the afterlife. The novel ends when Julia, Colwort, and the remaining principal characters find that revolutionary France has been beset by the Illuminati’s principles of“anarchy, confusion, cruelty and bloodshed” (240), and so they depart for England where they live happily.” (Gretchen Murphy, New England women writers, secularity, and the federalist politics of church and state (2021) p.61-2)
Siân Silyn Roberts writes in detail about Julia and Illuminated Baron in her 2014 work, Gothic Subjects The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790-1861. She describes the novel as “neglected” by scholars and suggest this may be because it does not fit neatly into existing theories surrounding gothic and early America literature. Roberts notes that Woods deploys “every Radcliffean signature” whilst at the same time “refusing to conform to a strictly American nationalist framework.” (p.31) She continues:
“Yet Julia’s resemblance to a British gothic romance obscures the fact that the social problem of the novel is actually more American than British. As I see it, Wood’s novel does not simply set out to modernize aristocratic kinship structures at the level of a household. Wood also wants to take this model of social relations on the road, so to speak. By relocating Colwort and Julia to England at the novel’s end, she imagines a more expansive social unit that can claim the distinctive moral qualities associated with established gentry but whose constituents are far more removed from a fixed estate, or point of origin…” (p.35).
This very rare French translation is essential in extending the work done by scholars such as Gretchen Murphy and Siân Silyn Roberts by examining the ways in which Wood’s important early American novel was received in France and how it helped to shape French readers ideas of America. The novel - largely set in France - with its themes of conspiracy and revolution would have echoed many of the concerns of French readers in the years after the bloody French revolution and the reign of Terror that followed.
