Dacre (née King), Charlotte

Charlotte Dacre (c. 1782–1825) was the author of four novels – Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer (1805), Zofloya (1806), The Libertine (1807), and The Passions (1811) – and two volumes of poetry, Trifles of Helicon (1798) and Hours of Solitude (1805). She dedicated her first novel to Matthew Lewis, staking her claim as a female author to a type of horror writing normally reserved for men. Dacre is now most famous for the Gothic novel Zofloya, but each of her works offers important insight into eighteenth-century understandings of gender, religion, and race. The daughter of John King, a well-known Jewish moneylender who abandoned the family for a wealthy Christian mistress, Dacre wrote works reflecting both her status as a religious outsider and her ambivalence toward her father. All of her novels feature characters who abandon their families to disastrous consequences. Her writing career ended in 1815 when she married Nicholas Byrne, her editor at The Morning Post, with whom she had three children.