Author Description

Jane Talbot is an epistolary novel, a novel in the form of a series of letters, and like all of Brown's works it's a gripping tale and more than a little gothic. Charles Brockden Brown's novels are most often remembered as gothic fiction but he wasn't at all writing the sort of thing Ann Radcliffe was in his years writing on the other side of the Atlantic. His books were often violent, and full of the pointy-headed intellectuality of his day: they were drawn from late-Enlightenment scientific and medical thinking. Perhaps they're in debt to Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Holcroft and perhaps to the German "Schauer-romantik" of Friedrich Schiller. He built plots around motifs like sleepwalking and religious mania.