1.15 - The Gothic Novel Beyond Radcliffe and Lewis

Summary

Though numerous Gothic novels appeared in Romantic-era Britain, critics have tended to focus on the works of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory Lewis, largely ignoring the Gothic output of trade publishing houses such as the Minerva Press. Using the work of Eliza Parsons, Francis Lathom and Isabella Kelly, this chapter argues that the division of Romantic-era Gothics into worthwhile ‘originals’ and uninteresting ‘imitations’ misses the complex intertextuality that characterised Gothic fiction at this formative moment. First,the chapter challenges scholarship’s traditional ‘trickle-down’ model of influence by considering Parsons’s The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) alongside Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790): their shared plotline not only defies expectation by demonstrating Parsons’s independence, but raises the possibility that Radcliffe was responding to the lesser-known fictions published in her day. Second, it questions the sufficiency of the term ‘imitation’ by looking at the creative and subversive uses to which Kelly’s Eva (1799) and Lathom’s The Midnight Bell (1798) put the figure of the Bleeding Nun, an element from Lewis’s The Monk (1796).