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In 2012, Richard Pressman established Early American Reprints, a not-for-profit press housed at St. Mary's University in San Antonio designed to provide reader-friendly and affordable editions of early American texts that might otherwise be unavailable for classroom use. The Asylum—the press's fourth offering—is a wonderful addition to this effort. Published first in serial form in 1804 and then as a book in 1811, it was deeply beloved in its own day—Cathy Davidson has called it "the single most popular Gothic novel in early America" (Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America, 1986, 225). But it has largely fallen out of circulation today, even among academics specializing in the period, displaced by the legacy of Charles Brockden Brown (Mitchell's contemporary), whom scholars have positioned as a more coherent predecessor to Poe, Hawthorne, and other inheritors of the gothic tradition.
Leonard Tennenhouse's wide-ranging and erudite introduction touches on this issue of gothic inheritance among other themes. The Asylum, he argues convincingly, borrows from the British gothic tradition while up dating it to fit the regional and sociopolitical imperatives of the new nation. At the heart of Mitchell's story are two female protagonists—Selina and Melissa—both subjugated by paternal figures...