ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how author Kim Wilkins, in her gothic novel Angel of Ruin, revisits the fascination of Milton critics and female novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the genesis of Paradise Lost within a household full of women. Concentrating upon Milton’s domestic life, the source of his notoriety for misogynism, Wilkins explores the possibilities and quandaries of female authorial ambition within a genre that has so often been associated with masculinist authority. The chapter shows how Wilkins’ twenty-first century retelling of the genesis of Milton’s grand epic addresses many of the issues raised by subversive female readings and reinterpretations, and yet manages to pose a challenge to both patriarchal and feminist narratives of authorship and the Fall.
