Melmoth the Wanderer

The 1764 novel that invented Gothic fiction, with its haunted castle, its usurped inheritance and its prophecy of doom. Walpole set the template every gothic writer after him worked from.

Horace Walpole

Clara Reeve answered The Castle of Otranto in 1777 with a gothic story that keeps the ghost but grounds it in believable events. A key text of the female gothic tradition.

Clara Reeve

Radcliffe traps her heroine in a ruined abbey with a manuscript that names a murder. The novel that made her the most imitated writer of the 1790s.

Ann Radcliffe

The definitive gothic romance of the 18th century. Emily St. Aubert is taken to a remote Apennine fortress where every terror turns out to have an explanation, and none of them arrive in time.

Ann Radcliffe

The scandal of 1796 and the most extreme gothic novel of its era. Lewis pushed the genre from suggestion into open horror, and the book was censored for it.

Matthew Gregory Lewis