Ballades van Verschrikking: Verleden en Verbeeldingskracht in Tales of Superstition and Chivalry (1802) van Anne Bannerman

Female authorship of historical novels in the Romantic period (ca. 1750-1830) is critically established, but these insights have not yet come to fruition in research on ballad collections. This article aims to examine how Anne Bannerman (?1765-1829) uses the ballad form to write fictional history. Her collection of original ballads, Tales of Superstition and Chivalry (1802), draws from the margins of the past and creates supernaturally informed historical tales. I argue that Bannerman weaves together gender, Gothic and history to demonstrate that historical retrieval is only possible through the use of the imagination. In analysing the interrelation between the text and paratext, I demonstrate how she construes an open-ended narrative to suggest that all historical record is an interpretation. In so doing, my research contributes to a more critical understanding of how women authors appropriated the past and used the ballad form to do so.