ABSTRACT
Madame Llewellyn was a female antiquarian and classical scholar, steeped in the ancient history of her people. That history forms the subject matter of a number of other fictions of the period which make use of Gothic phenomena. A number of later nineteenth- and twentieth-century Welsh- and English-language texts which may arguably be categorized as Gothic are haunted by the same dread. A culture tends to gothicize that which it most fears; many of the fears encoded in Welsh Gothic writing are specific to the history of Welsh people, none more so than this dominant dread of having enacted the role of the betrayer of one's own endangered culture. The Mountain Bard', for example, is an extended prose account of the legend of the last Welsh bard, left mourning his brethren after their supposed slaughter by Edward. William Earles's second publication, Welsh Legends, lays similar emphasis on the importance of Welsh resistance to assimilation under English rule.
