History features prominently in contemporary British fi ction as a way of creatively re-appropriating the past. Romance, taken here as a mode and not as genre, fi nds itself in close association with a renewed form of historiography. Romance may be briefl y defi ned in contrast to the novel as “eschew[ing] verisimilitude, prefer[ing] [ . . . ] the far to the near, because it replaces the horizontal linear description of the phenomenal world by either more vertical probings into mystery (in the case of the Gothic) or elevations towards the transcendent (in religious romances)” (Ganteau 226).