Early American Literature

Early American Reprints, the not-for-profit publisher founded by Richard S. Pressman, has released an edition of Julia and the Illuminated Baron by Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood. Originally published [End Page 798] in 1800, Julia and the Illuminated Baron was Wood's first novel and the first gothic novel written by a woman in the United States. It takes place in France before the French Revolution and tells the story of Julia, a virtuous heroine of unknown lineage who is ensnared by one of the Illuminati, a libertine Baron who imprisons her in his dark castle filled with secrets, including that of her true identity. Expressly written to address secularism and anarchy associated with the French Revolution, the novel thus conveyed the deepest fears of Wood's Federalist and Congregationalist New England.

Julia and the Illuminated Baron was out of print for over two hundred years, until 2012, when it was rereleased as part of the Library of Early Maine Literature, a University of Maine at Machias Press imprint, with an editorial apparatus created through a faculty-student collaboration overseen by Gerard NeCastro and Marcus LiBrizzi. Thus, the 2021 Early American Reprints edition does not enter an entirely empty field; instead, it complements this existing 2012 edition with several unique features. One of these is the Early American Reprint's inclusion of two anti-Illuminati sermons by Congregationalist ministers Timothy Dwight and Jedidiah Morse, which help demonstrate how the sometimes wildly sensational story squares with early US concerns about religion, morality, and government. Despite its French setting and gothic elements, the novel pointedly addresses its concerns to US democracy in the early republic, and these contextual materials will help readers draw these connections.

Edited by Pressman, the 2021 edition also includes a helpful introduction by Scott Slawinski, which describes this religious and political context, the novel's publication history, Wood's biography and her place in early American literary culture, and the novel's influences in the gothic tradition. The introduction is brief—twelve pages—leaving plenty of room for readers to draw their own conclusions and interpretations. Certainly readers who bring their own critical interests, such as a postsecular approach to the novel's braided concerns with faith and rationality, can find much of interest in the novel.

The edition's ample textual notes identify allusions, help readers keep track of characters, define antiquated or unusual vocabulary, and occasionally point out or correct narrative inconsistencies. The annotations for vocabulary seem particularly directed at undergraduate readers, defining fairly familiar terms (such as "your toilet" meaning "grooming" or a [End Page 799] "fortnight" meaning "two weeks"), but these are unobtrusive for readers who don't need them. And the notes directed at keeping track of characters are helpful for readers of all skill levels, as Wood's convoluted plot filled with aristocratic titles and hidden identities makes tracking characters challenging. (A list of characters provided in this edition is also helpful to this end.) Wood's sensational novel, the political paranoia that provoked it, and the questions of democracy it raises are all surprisingly relevant to twenty-first-century readers, and this new edition makes it easier than ever for readers to access this novel and draw these connections. [End Page 800]