Sleath’s The Orphan of the Rhine is one of the Northanger Abbey Horrid Novels. If you want to start with something short and ease your way into to Radcliffe reading, try A Sicilian Romance – condensed and to the point with all your favourite tropes. My favourite? The Italian or The Romance of the Forest. ‘The Great Enchantress’ mixed tales of peril with a keen eye to aesthetics. Radcliffe is perhaps the most famous of the writers of the Gothic’s heyday in the 1790s. Emmeline, or, the Orphan of the Castle (1788) is an early example of the classic persecuted heroine. Smith’s ‘Elegiac Sonnets’ were key in the Romantic rise of the sonnet but she was also the author of a number of Gothicky novels, including Emmeline and The Manor House. They grew up in ‘the Recess’ (a hidden monastic space) but their freedom only brings further disasterĪn erudite Dissenting educator, Anna Barbauld collaborated with her brother John on a theorisation of the appeal of fear in fiction and produced the fragment ‘Sir Bertram’. Her Gothically claustrophobic text The Recess (1785) reimagined history, giving Mary, Queen of Scots, two daughters and telling their tale.

It was originally published as ‘Champion of Virtue’ in reduced circles in 1777.Īuthor and playwright, she and her sisters ran a school in Bath. It got rid of excessive supernaturalism and kept the medieval peril. Reeve responded to Walpole’s genre starting Castle of Otranto with The Old English Baron (1778). The entries are fairly brief but I’m happy to tackle any questions you have! Enjoy the list and if you feel like supporting me or chucking me a tip, there’s a ko-fi and a patreon 1 – 10 It includes more gifs and pictures! But for ease, I’ve collated them all into one list. You can find it here, if you’re interested. I recently completed a twitter thread on 100 women.

Salt Magic, Skin Magic by Lee Welch