Charlotte Dacre

Charlotte Dacre (died 1825) was a British Gothic novelist and poet, born Charlotte King, who first wrote under the pseudonym Rosa Matilda. She was a daughter of the London moneylender and radical writer John King, and she published verse with her sister Sophia King before issuing poems under the Dacre name. She wrote four novels: Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer in 1805, Zofloya in 1806, The Libertine in 1807 and The Passions in 1811. Zofloya, or the Moor, the story of a sexually ruthless heroine drawn into servitude to a Moorish servant who proves to be Satan, was the most successful and was translated into German, French and Italian. It influenced Percy Bysshe Shelley's early Gothic novels. Her work fell into obscurity until feminist scholars recovered Zofloya in the 1990s, and it is now a staple of Gothic study.