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Gothic
romance
Type of novel that
flourished in the late 18th and early 19th cent. in England. Gothic romances
were mysteries, often involving the supernatural and heavily tinged with
horror, and they were usually set against dark backgrounds of medieval
ruins and haunted castles. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
was the forerunner of the type, which included the works of Ann Radcliffe,
Matthew Gregory Lewis, and Charles R. Maturin, and the novel Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley. Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey satirizes
Gothic romances. The influence of the genre can be found in some works
of Coleridge, Le Fanu, Poe, and the Brontës. During the 1960s so-called
Gothic novels became enormously popular in England and the United States.
Seemingly modeled on Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Daphne
du Maurier's Rebecca, these novels usually concern spirited young
women, either governesses or new brides, who go to live in large gloomy
mansions populated by peculiar servants and precocious children and presided
over by darkly handsome men with mysterious pasts. Popular practitioners
of this genre are Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt, Catherine Cookson, and Dorothy
Eden.
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