An Angel’s Form and a Devil’s Heart was written by Selina Davenport. Davenport (1779-1859) became a professional writer after leaving her husband, who claimed to have been swindled and financially ruined by Davenport and her father. Davenport went on to write eleven novels, most of them Gothics like An Angel’s Form and a Devil’s Heart.

The protagonist of An Angel’s Form and a Devil’s Heart is the Marchioness of Anendale. She was clearly intended by Davenport to be a shocking Gothic villain, on part with characters like William Henry Ireland’s Vittoria Bracciano (see: The Abbess) and Charlotte Dacre’s Victoria de Loredani (see: Zofloya: Or, The Moor). But after hundreds of pages of tedious Gothic clichés and plot complications, and numerous discussions of the Marchioness’ wickedness, the revelation of her true character comes as a gross disappointment. She was formerly Miss Gertrude Fitz-Arthur. As a teenager she fell in love with a man and seduced him. She got pregnant by him but refused to relinquish her independence by marrying the man, and she ran away and then abandoned her child. During those years she was “violent and untameable, so headstrong and so self-willed,”¹ “always so proud and overbearing, so haughty to her inferiors, and so bold and forward to her equals,”² but she committed no other crimes or sins besides refusing to be a mother to her child. Fitz-Arthur eventually married the Marquis of Anendale and became a notable member of Society, a woman known for her great intelligence and taste. When a young artist, Edward Mackenzie, comes to London, she befriends him. She begins to feel a sexual attraction to him, but before she can act on it she discovers that he is her son, the child she abandoned. Overwhelmed with shame, she takes laudanum and commits suicide.

An Angel’s Form is not well-written. Its domestic plot sits uneasily with the Gothic elements, which are mild even by the standards of Davenport’s time. The novel is generally didactic, and Davenport is unable to bring herself to approach the more enjoyably sordid moments of the porno-Gothic tradition established by Matthew Lewis in The Monk. An Angel’s Form is a “sentimental Gothic novel,” that is, a Gothic which makes use of the tropes, motifs, and aspects of the sentimental novel (a.k.a. the novel of Sensibility (see: Gothic)), or “novels which utilize ghosts and gloomy-castle atmosphere to enliven sentimental-domestic tales."³

Unfortunately, Davenport, whose Gothic novels were full of well-delineated villains and villainesses like the Marchioness, seems to have been temperamentally more suited to write a novel of sentiment and Sensibility than a villain-heavy Gothic. Davenport emphasizes the emotions and the relationships of the main characters and slights what in villain-intensive Gothics are the main feature: the wicked acts and thoughts and feelings of the villain. Davenport seemingly lacked the nerve to fictionally indulge in evil and wickedness, something emphatically not the case with Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, and many another Gothic author.

Print: Selina Davenport, An Angel’s Form and a Devil’s Heart. London: Forgotten Books, 2015.

¹ Selina Davenport, An Angel’s Form and a Devil’s Heart (London: Minerva Press, 1818), 113.

² Davenport, An Angel’s Form, 64.

³ Robert D. Hume, “Gothic Versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel,” PMLA 84.2 (Mar. 1969): 283.