The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times

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Description

Sophia Lee's The Recess begins with a secret almost too dangerous to write down: that Mary, Queen of Scots, bore twin daughters in hidden captivity, and that these daughters — Matilda and Ellinor — were raised from infancy in a concealed underground chamber beneath a ruined abbey, the "recess" of the title, kept alive by a single household of servants sworn never to speak of them. When the sisters finally leave their hiding place as young women, they carry the one inheritance a Tudor court cannot allow them to have: a legitimate claim to the throne of England. What follows is a novel of forbidden love, court conspiracy, and permanent concealment, as Matilda and Ellinor are drawn separately into the orbits of the Earl of Leicester and the Earl of Essex, forced to survive entirely on secrecy in a world where the truth of their birth is itself a capital offense.

First published in three volumes between 1783 and 1785, The Recess is now recognized by literary historians as one of the earliest historical novels in English — decades before Walter Scott made the genre famous — and a direct ancestor of the Gothic novel that followed it. Its imagery of hidden chambers, ruined abbeys, and secrets buried beneath the ground shaped the generation of Gothic writers who came after, Ann Radcliffe most of all, yet the novel that started it has been almost entirely forgotten by general readers. This Nile Book Store edition restores the complete, unabridged text of all three volumes.

Author & Genre

Sophia Lee (1750–1824) was an English novelist and playwright who ran a girls' school in Bath with her sisters to support her family after their actor father's death. The Recess, her most ambitious work, blends real Elizabethan history and figures with an entirely invented private story — a technique historical novelists would use for the next two centuries. Genre: Historical Fiction / Gothic Romance.

"Concealed pleasures are allowed to be the greatest; nor can any remark be more just; to deceive the watchful, reflects a compliment on our own sagacity, which renders us insensible to the error."