Craciun's question: 'How would we read Zofloya if we did not know the sex of the author, much less whether or not she identified herself as a feminist?'(p. The extracts from early reviews of Zofloya, which Craciun gives in an Appendix, show how the early negative reception of the novel was a response to its status as a book written by a woman which is addressed to a female audience. Victoria, like Desdemona, is enchanted by them, but, contrary to Shakespeare's heroine, she does not see Zofloya's visage in his mind, and is not allowed to discover his true self until it is too late. Zofloya is a moor, a stranger, who has fought many battles, and who likes to relate them to the woman he has chosen. The faint echo from Othello in the title points to a possible indebtedness to Shakespeare's Moor, but the resemblance between the two characters is almost insubstantial. Zofloya is the 'other', the foreign element of the novel, but he is also the 'other' in Victoria. Everybody submits to Victoria she submits to Zofloya, is elevated and then plunged into a Dantesque abyss, and finally neglects terror and transcendence in favour of control. Victoria is transformed from the masculine woman of the first part of the novel to the feminine woman of the second: she loses her self-control when she meets Zofloya. The strong emphasis on the sexual objectification of men and on their submissive masculine response, challenges the traditional feminine subjugation to men. The male characters of the novel are, on the contrary, victims of an excess of feeling.

In the first half of the novel, the lack of femininity in Victoria is the result of a loss of the sublime. In the Eighteenth Century, femininity was a source for the sublime, which in its turn became a model for female virtue. In Zofloya, Dacre made use of two recent theorisations of the sublime which distinguished between the negative, and the positive, or Wordsworthian, sublime.

Zofloya the moor