ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Helme, who died in 1813, was a popular novelist. The Farmer of Inglewood Forest, by Helme, is an incest-obsessed melodrama that follows the fortunes of two rural families, the Godwins and the Bertrams, over three generations. The final pages return to the novel’s thwarted beginning by celebrating the nuptials of cousins from the third generation of the Godwin-Bertram family alliance. The novel features benevolent characters such as Mrs Palmer, Henry Walters, and Editha Fitzgerald, all of whom voluntarily manumit slaves whenever they can. Featured through vignettes in a popular Gothic novel such as Helme’s, slavery and its remediation are treated as important subjects even though the work’s principal action is only tangentially related to the topic.
