Authors

Matthew Lewis. Please note that The Literary Gothic will be shutting down soon.

Thanks to all who have visited, and Stay Haunted. 9 July 1775 - 10 May 1818 This unattributed etching of Lewis (you can see what may well be the source by clicking on the "Portraits" link at left) served as the frontispiece to The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis (London: Henry Colburn, 1839). Like Mary Shelley, Lewis made a huge impact with his teenage (and only) novel The Monk, which more or less defined the far edge of sensational Gothicism when it was published in 1796. Sites: Etexts: Adelmorn the Outlaw Available as e-facsimile in PDF. "Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogine" "The Anaconda" From Lewis' collection Romantic Tales, a 4-volume work first published in 1808; this collection was a hodge-podge, many of its pieces adapted from European sources. [1808] The Bravo of Venice The Castle Spectre The entire etext of Lewis's 1796 Gothic drama, possibly his most successful and well-known drama, is finally available. Horace Walpole.

Please note that The Literary Gothic will be shutting down soon.

Thanks to all who have visited, and Stay Haunted. 24 September 1717 - 2 March 1797 When it comes to Gothic fiction, Walpole (later in his life the Earl of Orford) is The Man—his clumsy and over-the-top (at least to most modern readers) melodramatic thriller The Castle of Otranto, published on Christmas Eve in 1764 (the year in which James Watt perfected the steam engine, thus laying the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution), more-or-less began the Gothic as we know it. Initally accepted rather favorably, Otranto was villified by the press once it was revealed, in the second edition, that the work was not in fact a translation of an old manuscript but the contemporary creation of the politically and socially well-connected son of a Prime Minister. Walpole's drama The Mysterious Mother, never performed in his lifetime, dealt with another topic that would attract much (scandalized) attention in the Romantic period: incest.

Ann Radcliffe. Ann Radcliffe was an English author, a pioneer of the gothic novel.

She was born Ann Ward in Holborn, July 9, 1764. Her father was William Ward, a haberdasher; her mother was Ann Oates. At the age of 22, she married journalist William Radcliffe, owner and editor of the English Chronicle, in Bath in 1788. The marriage was childless and, to amuse herself, she began to write fiction, which her husband encouraged. She published The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne in 1789. Her works were extremely popular among the upper class and the growing middle class, especially among young women.

The success of The Romance of the Forest established Radcliffe as the leading exponent of the historical Gothic romance. They determined on walking round Beechen Cliff, that noble hill whose beautiful verdure and hanging coppice render it so striking an object from almost every opening in Bath. She died on February 7, 1823 from respiratory problems probably caused by pneumonia.