Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1989, this novel combines aspects of romance fiction, historical fiction, and fantasy to freshen the telling of a double set of complex relationships. Reminiscent of The French Lieutenant’s Woman by… Read More ›
G. A. Henty’s works today remain useful as examples of 19th-century children’s literature for boys of a chauvinistic bent. Overbearingly patriotic, the novels prove bombastic to modern readers. However, in Henty’s day, novels such as Under Drake’s Flag captured the… Read More ›
According to Sheridan Le Fanu, he had published a shorter form of his novel Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh under the title “A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess”; reports as to where the story appeared… Read More ›
Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, long acknowledged as the best of the many works by James Hogg (1770–1835), focuses on the religious and political conflict in Scotland at the end of the 18th century. The first portion,… Read More ›
Jane Austen had begun writing her final book, Northanger Abbey, in 1798. It was accepted by a publisher in 1803 but would not be published until 1818, one year following her death. The book was a satire on the wildly… Read More ›
Following Anne Radcliffe in creating fiction of the Gothic genre, M. G. Lewis published his sensation fiction, The Monk, for a public eager to indulge in entertainment highly dependent on horror elements. Unlike Radcliffe’s more sophisticated The Mysteries of Udolpho… Read More ›
First serialized in Robin Goodfellow and then in The Sixpenny Magazine, Mary Braddon’s most famous novel, Lady Audley’s Secret, became an instant hit with the reading public, if not with critics. In its year of publication in volume form, 1862,… Read More ›
When Robert Buchanan wrote Foxglove Manor, he had experienced years of poverty, worsened by the illness of his wife. Her death in 1881 followed the failure of his journal, Light, leaving him penniless and desperate for funds. In order to… Read More ›
Like all Charlotte Smith’s novels, her first, Emmeline, contained strong autobiographical elements. Through fiction, Smith found a way to protest her situation as mother to a large brood of children with a profligate husband who had abandoned the family. According… Read More ›
Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto proved crucial to the development of Gothic fiction. As indicated by the book’s subtitle, Walpole (1717–97) designed it to provide readers with a romance incorporating a dark, moody villain, an endangered heroine, a hero… Read More ›
Sir Walter Scott based his novel The Bride of Lammermoor, second in his Tales of My Landlord series, on a true tragic love story about a Scottish family named Dalrymple, supported by fictional accounts, poetry, and popular ballad versions. He… Read More ›
The term Gothicism in its literary meaning derives not from the Goths, an ancient Germanic tribe, but from the sense of Gothic as medieval. This literary movement may be seen as a reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment and… Read More ›
The theatrical quality of du Maurier’s (13 May 1907 – 19 April 1989) novels is evidenced by the frequency and reported ease with which her works were adapted for the big screen. Alfred Hitchcock directed film versions of Jamaica Inn,… Read More ›
By the end of the nineteenth century, writers interested in exploring supernatural themes had abandoned the mode of gothic fiction pioneered by eighteenth century English novelist Horace Walpole. Walpole and his imitators had exploited such props as medieval ruins and… Read More ›
The play of fear and laughter has been inscribed in Gothic texts since their inception, an ambivalence that disturbs critical categories that evaluate their seriousness or triviality. The uncertainty perpetuates Gothic anxieties at the level of narrative and generic form,… Read More ›
The play between mythological and modern significance, between mystical and scientific visions of horror and unity, sexuality and sacred violence, is focused in the figure of the vampire. In Mary Braddon’s ‘Good Lady Ducayne’ (1896) the vampire theme signals the… Read More ›
It would be difficult to claim that there is such a thing as a ‘school’ or even emerging tradition of ‘spectral criticism’. Rather, what use of the term might seek to bring together would be a series of images and… Read More ›
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