NO changes have been made to the original text. Leather Binding on Spine and Corners with Golden leaf printing on spine. He needs her as his victim but it is Victoria herself who accepts her fate as such, by willingly letting herself be manipulated by him, and by finally rejecting her Guardian Angel's warning against him.Leatherbound. Zofloya (Satan) rejoices in driving Victoria to perdition. Her feminine nature only reappears in her relationship to Zofloya to whom she feels attracted and whom she is inexplicably unable to dominate. She gets married only to escape her predestined fate when she falls in love with Henriquez, her husband's brother, she is ready to commit any crime to seduce him. Victoria 'uses' men to achieve her own pleasure, reversing a typical male role. These misogynist views might paradoxically be the issue of a pre-Feminist conscience in Dacre who, on other occasions, criticised feminist writings. Lilla, the fragile and naive woman-child, is the only positive female character of the novel, but she is ridiculed by Dacre: her lack of strength, as with the male characters of the novel, is finally the cause of her tragedy. Dacre's misogynism appears in the portrayals of Victoria, of Victoria's mother, and of Megalena Strozzi, whom she condemns for yielding to passion and lust. Bienville had given an explanation of feminine subjectivity and women's 'otherness' from a misogynist perspective. Bienville's Nymphomania, or, A Dissertation Concerning the Furor Uterinus (1775), which Dacre read, helps to explain some of her views which might otherwise sound anti-feminist. Dacre focused on this second concern and repeatedly blamed Victoria's mother for her daughter's immoral behaviour. Young women were warned against the dangers of seduction, and their parents against illicit behaviours which could influence their children negatively.

Despite these macabre components, Zofloya aimed at conveying a moral teaching. The Gothic novel's wicked father is replaced by an unnatural mother the young victim is not innocent and is finally granted no redemption the seducer turns out to be a devil in disguise, who wants his victim's soul, but not her body.

In terms of plot, Dacre's novel draws upon Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Lewis's The Monk but it shows an element of novelty in its revision of some Gothic stereotypes. It sold 754 of 1000 printed copies in six months, was translated into German and French, inspired an anonymous chapbook and many of Dacre's contemporaries and early successors.

Zofloya book