What Were The Main Features Of The Gothic Novel?

The Gothic novel was mainly popular in the late 18th and early 19th century. Originally the term meant "medieval" as in architecture, but it gradually came to mean strange, macabre and usually supernatural. A typical setting for a Gothic novel might be a ruined castle, in the depths of wild, rugged countryside (Switzerland and Italy were popular settings, and authors were quite happy to decribe these "exotic"places without having visited them) preferably haunted and with a large graveyard or family crypt nearby. Kidnappings, stolen inheritances and shocking deathbed confessions are routine. The genre was in a sense created, and certainly popularised, by Horace Walpole in "The Castle of Otranto" in 1764. Another famous exponent of the genre was Ann Radcliffe, author of such bestsellers as "The Mysteries of Udolpho" and "the Italian." In many ways she created the standard Gothic romance, although in the Radcliffe novels the bizarre events usually turn out to have rational explanations.