Fiction, horror, death, and sometimes romance, written to cause “a pleasing sort of terror,” is what defines Gothic Literature. Given the recent death of my mother, this new orphan is unsurprised that 2019 looks to be a very Gothic one.
Jane Austen satirized the love of the Gothic novel in her own novel Northanger Abbey. The Gothic was a fad started in 1764 with Walpole’s publication of The Castle of Otranto, a book quite famous by the time Austen was born in 1775. Otranto was our January kick-off book. You can read about the lovely time we had
I read Otranto in college (well, some of it, anyway), and it was fun to return to it’s theatrical structure, multi-layered plot, and enjoyably dense language. I learned (was reminded of?) a ton of interesting facts by my local group of avid readers.
The edition of the book I still had from the ’90s was slow to start. It took me time to warm up my brain cells and get them to process dialog without the help of punctuation and white space. Ah, modern readers are so spoiled! Some of my fellow Janeites had “better” copies with more annotations and a more readable layout.
Northanger Abbey is the focus book for the 2019 Jane Austen Annual General Meeting. The Austen Fan and Literary Convention
This means you can watch my blog for reviews of other Gothic books; Classical, like Frankenstein, and modern, like Pride and Prometheus.
The complete list of what we’re reading is here, so feel free to join the fun!
What do you think?