The Marquise and the Novice

by Victoria Ramstetter

Acolyte Kathleen Thorn leaves the security and pent up frustration of the nunnery to become a governess for the only child of a wilful, beautiful and mysterious Marquise Annaliese. She becomes entangled in the web of mysteries surrounding the dark and seductive woman and the manor she inhabits, and finds her innocent and naive virginal self being led down a tantalizing and mysterious path, that may culminate in death, drama or something equally Gothic and thrilling!

Genres: LGBT, Lesbian, Historical Fiction, Gothic, Romance, Fiction

101 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1981

Reviews

[Z.]

Fun novella, though I would have liked to see it expanded by a few hundred pages. It's set in vague 18th or 19th century France but very much feels like a product of 70s-80s lesbian feminist communities (mostly in a good way). I didn't know beforehand that there are illustrations by Tee Corinne, so that was a nice surprise.

The back matter has an interesting list of other books published by Naiad at the time.

[Mel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was very entertaining. It was written by a lesbian author who had a weakness for Gothic novels and wanted to do a queer version. It was the story of the young Irish girl from the convent who was hired as a governess to the mysterious Marquise. It was a fairly promising beginning. It had the right tone and the young wide eyed girl, who just happened to fancy women, acting in that setting was pretty fantastic. It did fall short on a few levels, there were some obvious modern Americanisms that jumped off the page, there wasn't nearly enough of a threat and no supernatural elements at all, and the sex was described in far too much detail. At a 100 pages it was also terribly short, when suddenly a random nephew showed up his story was explained in one paragraph instead of a 100 pages as would have been done in an 18th or 19th century novel. Still it was lots of fun and definitely a genre more people should write in. It made me want to go back and edit my re-telling of Carmilla as the world definitely needs more queer Gothic romances.

[Jen Hanson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m not sure why anyone would describe this as “silly.”

Beautiful, wonderfully gothic, a splendid ending. Exactly what I was looking for after reading The Turn of the Screw and Carmilla.

Anneliese is akin to Ann Lister. <3

Read it! (And someone make a movie of it, please.)

[S. Wigget · Rating 3 out of 5]

I expected this book to be quite silly, but at least it proved to be entertaining and better than I anticipated. It could definitely use a big revision.

[Maggy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A silly but entertaining adaptation of the Gothic tropes.