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Uncertain Inheritance: The Motherless Heiress In Big House Novels, Anna Bedsole
Uncertain Inheritance: The Motherless Heiress In Big House Novels, Anna Bedsole
Theses and Dissertations--English
Thus, Uncertain Inheritance traces the heiress in Anglo-Irish Big House novels situated at key times of change for the Irish Ascendancy. The Gothic triad of orphaned heiress, dead mother, and sinister uncle does not belong exclusively to the realm of Irish Gothic authors, but rather this triad is used for different discursive purposes than in its English counterparts. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas (1864), Sommerville and Ross’s An Irish Cousin (1903), and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1929) use the Gothic trope of absent mothers both to address anxieties about and to question the Irish “half” of the Ascendancy Anglo-Irish …