Clara Reeve

Clara Reeve
Born	1729 Ipswich, England
Died	1807
Occupation	novelist
Nationality	English
Genres	fiction
Influenced Mary Shelley

Clara Reeve (1729–1807) was an English novelist, best known for her Gothic fiction work The Old English Baron (1777).

Reeve was born in Ipswich, England, one of the eight children of Reverend Willian Reeve, M.A., Rector of Freston and of Kreson in Suffolk, and perpetual curate of St Nicholas. Her mother's maiden name was Smithies, daughter of a Smithies, a goldsmith and jeweller to King George I.

She was the author of several novels, of which only one is remembered: The Champion of Virtue, later known as The Old English Baron (1777), written in imitation of, or rivalry with, the Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, with which it has often been printed. Her novel noticeably influenced Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. She also wrote the epistolatory novel The School for Widows (1791). Her innovative history of prose fiction, The Progress of Romance (1785), can be regarded generally as a precursor to modern histories of the novel and specifically as upholding the tradition of female literary history heralded by Elizabeth Rowe (1674–1737) and Susannah Dobson, d. 1795. One of the stories in this work, "The History of Charoba, Queen of Egypt", was the inspiration for Walter Savage Landor's first major work Gebir.

See also

Novels portal

• Gothic fiction

External links

• Works by Clara Reeve at Project Gutenberg (plain text and HTML)
• Works by or about Clara Reeve at Internet Archive (scanned books original editions color illustrated)

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Cousin, John William (1910). A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London, J. M. Dent & Sons; New York, E. P. Dutton.

Persondata
Name	Reeve, Clara
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1729
Place of birth	Ipswich, England
Date of death	1807
Place of death