Wicked Uncles and Haunted Cellars

It is many years since I first read Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen and I still remember rolling about with laughter at the sketch of the gothic heroine’s adventures as painted by hero Henry Tilney. Curiously, I had not read any truly gothic narratives at that hour of my life. But as a creature of the film and television age, I recognised all of the motifs that storytellers and movie directors use to hook an audience, the uncertain young woman arriving at the unfamiliar house (or mansion or castle) – to work, to live, whatever – who happens upon an unspeakable secret and ends up fighting, possibly for her life and/or those of others. The genre had been initiated by Horace Walpole, who penned his seminal novel, The Castle of Otranto in 1764. This ignited an insatiable readership for tales of innocent maidens in peril, of mysterious documents begging to be deciphered, frantic journeys across unfamiliar terrain, coffins in the crypts and bats in the belfries of rambling, ruined castles. In the late 1700s, writers such as Ann Radcliffe and Clara Reeve seized upon the seed sown by Walpole and produced novels that were eagerly bought by a newly-literate female readership. Why did Walpole write his novel and what were the reasons for the proliferation of its successors? And why did Jane Austen pour such vitriol upon it? It is in an attempt to answer these and other questions that I wrote my book, Wicked Uncles and Haunted Cellars: What the Gothic Heroine Tells Us Today . It has just been published by Greenwich Exchange https://greenex.co.uk/home/p/wicked-uncles-and-haunted-cellars Over the coming months, I take an alternative look at gothic motifs, black cats, skeletons, etc. – or you can just read the book. In the meantime, check out this picture of the ghost of Horace as he works.