Gothic literature and Jane Austen
- Heather Moll
- Jul 13
- 3 min read
Loving Miss Tilney is about Eleanor Tilney, a secondary character in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, which itself is a parody of the Gothic novels popular of the late eighteenth century. Catherine Moreland’s views are distorted by her active imagination and her fondness for these gothic novels. She imagines herself as a heroine, but it’s motherless Eleanor’s silent suffering at the hands of a cruel father that makes her Northanger Abbey’s true gothic heroine.
"Gothic" literature has its origins in the subtitle of Horace Walpole’s 1764 The Castle of Otranto, which on a second printing added “A Gothic Story”. It implied a medieval story, given the book was pretending to be a rediscovered account hidden in someone’s library for centuries. It’s a supernatural tale with a prophecy, a beautiful virgin, a dutiful wife, and a handsome peasant, all within a haunted castle. The genre reached the height of its popularity in the 1790s.
These works typically involve remote landscapes with vulnerable heroines. There is violence and eroticism, and supernatural events or someone being haunted by the past. Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), for example, shows how outrageous a Gothic romance can be. It has a man who elopes with a ghost, a demon in disguise, a monk who kills and rapes, and trading souls with Satan.
One founder of the Gothic genre was Ann Radcliffe. She wrote poetry, a travelogue, and other novels, but is best known for the Gothic romances she published in the 1790s: The Romance of the Forest in 1791; The Mysteries of Udolpho in 1794; and The Italian in 1796. Her style was a stark contrast to more lurid works like The Monk. Her works are characterized by psychological suspense rather than actual gore, and by suggestions of supernatural activity over actual manifestations of the supernatural.
Radcliffe’s novels are set abroad and with lengthy descriptions of scenery. Udolpho is set amongst the looming Apennine Mountains and she derived her settings from travel books. On the title page of most of her novels was the description that was more common at the time than the word ‘gothic’: her usual subtitle was ‘A Romance’.
Some scholars believe that Radcliffe and writers like her exemplify a subset of Gothic literature called the female Gothic that centers on themes pertinent to women, like the persecuted heroine and her economic marginalization, the fear of sexual violence, and threats in her domestic sphere. These novels have female-specific things to fear, like anxieties about marriage and a lack of independence, and explore the path to growing up—very Austen-like—but amid supernatural elements and fantastic adventures that are typically out of reach for women.
Regardless if there’s a female gothic sub-genre or just a gothic genre, they are all characterized by excess and the absurd, and this is what Austen beautifully satirizes in her more prosaic Northanger Abbey. Besides Udolpho and the Italian, there are other gothic titles mentioned in Northanger Abbey: Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Even the titles evoke the spooky and tense feelings of what we expect from a gothic tale.
Gothic novels also influenced the shift to the Romantic poets in the early nineteenth century. You can see Mary Shelly’s monster in these early works, and gothic themes influenced early Victorian novelists like Poe and the Brontes.
The gothic novel had melodramatic plots and featured elements like a dark mood, curses, castles, villains, supernatural, and death. This opposes the neoclassical rationality that was also taking hold.
In Austen’s novels, there are no perfect heroines and absolute villains. She wrote fully developed characters with flaws and the “bad guys” rarely get the comeuppance they deserve—rather like real life.
Have you read any of these late nineteenth century gothic novels? Have you read any of the works mentioned in Northanger Abbey? I enjoy some of the later works that have their roots in the gothic novels of the 1790s, but I haven't read any myself yet. What would Catherine Morland say if she knew I haven't read any of her horrid novels?