Clara Reeve

Author

• Born: January 23, 1729
• Birthplace: Ipswich, Suffolk, England
• Died: December 3, 1807
• Place of death: Ipswich, Suffolk, England

Biography

Clara Reeve was born in Ipswich, Suffolk, England, on January 23, 1729, the eldest daughter of William Reeve, rector of Freston and Kerton and perpetual curate of St Nicholas, Ipswich. Her mother, Hannah, was the daughter of William Smithies, a goldsmith. Reeve was one of eight children; her siblings included Samuel, who became a vice admiral, and Thomas, who became rector of Brockley and master of Bungay Grammar School

Reeve’s early education was guided by her liberally inclined father. After her father died in 1755, she moved with her mother and two of her sisters to Colchester. However, she took exception to her family’s expectations for her and eventually moved back to Ipswich, deciding to make a living as a writing. Her first book of poetry was published by subscription in 1769. It demonstrated a strong interest in music, treated as a philosophical inquiry. She also was very interested in conchology, or the study of shells, anticipating the subsequent fashionability of “natural theology.”

Reeve published an English translation of a Latin allegory by John Barclay in 1772 but there was no money to be gained from such esoterica, so she produced a novel, issued anonymously as The Champion of Virtue: A Gothic Story in 1777. It was quickly reprinted, in a signed edition, as The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story and was enthusiastically marketed as a work in the same genre as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). Although it had little in common with Walpole’s supernatural extravaganza, Reeve’s novel became the second great success of the emergent Gothic novel.

Slightly embarrassed by her success, Reeve followed up The Old English Baron with a moralistic contemporary novel, The Two Mentors: A Modern Story. She then published an apologia for prose fiction, The Progress of Romance, Through Times, Countries, and Manners, with Remarks on the Good and Bad Effects of It, on Them Respectively, in a Course of Evening Conversations, to which she appended the French-inspired allegory “The History of Charoba, Queen of Aegypt.” She wrote one wholehearted Gothic ghost story, “Castle Connor,” in 1787, but she misplaced the manuscript on a coach on which she was traveling to London. Another of her novels, The Exiles, apparently was begun in collaboration with a mysteriously unnamed gentleman, but she finished it alone. The School for Widows: A Novel was conspicuously lighter in tone. Reeve approved of the French Revolution and planned a historical novel celebrating its ideals, but she was disillusioned by the Reign of Terror and wrote a didactic biography, Memoirs of Sir Roger de Clarendon, the Natural Son of Edward Prince of Wales, Commonly Called the Black Prince, with Anecdotes of Many Other Eminent Persons of the Fourteenth Century, instead.

Reeve was a protofeminist in her writings as well as her lifestyle and campaigned for social reform through education, with particular emphasis on women’s education. However, her greatest influence was in the encouragement she lent to a glut of relatively genteel Gothic novels by women, which contrasted strongly with the gory supernatural extravaganzas produced by many male writers. Reeve died in her Car Street cottage in Ipswich on December 3, 1807, and was buried in the churchyard of St Stephen’s in Ipswich. A moderately successful novel, Fatherless Fanny (1819), was falsely issued under her name after she died.