Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca movie from 1940.
What’s a Gothic novel? Definitions I found online include “a literary genre combining fiction, horror, death, and romance” that might be “set in gloomy, decaying locations like castles or ruined mansions” and also might feature “the intrusion of the past upon the present” as well as “dark secrets, supernatural elements” and “a brooding hero” and “a vulnerable female protagonist.”
Those definitions mean books in this category can be compelling, mysterious, haunting, and more. So, all that is an incentive for me to discuss various Gothic novels I’ve read.
I recently reread Daphne du Maurier’s mesmerizing Rebecca (1938), which is one of the first books that come to mind when thinking of the Gothic genre. It’s about an unnamed young woman who marries wealthy widower Maxim de Winter. His first wife? Rebecca, of course. The shy/insecure/inexperienced new spouse compares herself (and is compared by others) to the late Rebecca — whose presence remains palpable at Maxim’s huge Manderley estate. In which we meet sinister housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, who was very attached to the beautiful/charismatic/seemingly admirable Rebecca and treats the second Mrs. de Winter with contempt and cruelty.
After finishing Rebecca, I read for the first time du Maurier’s 1936 potboiler of a novel Jamaica Inn, which also has some Gothic elements (including a remote setting and plenty of terror) but no upper-class characters in the main cast. Not as skillfully composed as Rebecca, but still plenty gripping.
Du Maurier also wrote several other novels considered Gothic or part-Gothic — including 1951’s My Cousin Rachel and 1969’s The House on the Strand.
Going back to 19th-century literature, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) included various Gothic elements — a big old home, a mysterious woman in the attic, some disastrous events, an otherworldly occurrence, etc. Its story, several of its characters, and the dynamics of its central romance clearly influenced the Rebecca novel published nearly a century later.
Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (also 1847) has lots of Gothic content, too — obsession, psychological torment, ghostly apparitions, the wild moors…
Almost 30 years earlier, Mary Shelley’s ominous 1818 novel Frankenstein drips with atmosphere while also being an early example of science fiction.
Later in the 19th century, we have Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860) with its suspense, “insane asylum,” and mistaken identity; Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) with its split-personality motif, claustrophobia, and foggy London streets; and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), which I don’t need to summarize but can give many a reader nightmares.
In the realm of 19th-century short stories, a number of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales can be considered Gothic — including “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Masque of the Red Death.”
Joining du Maurier in writing 20th-century novels with at least some Gothic elements are authors such as Shirley Jackson (1959’s The Haunting of Hill House), Stephen King (1977’s The Shining), and Toni Morrison (1987’s Beloved).
And I shouldn’t forget to mention Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey — an 1817-published spoof of Gothic fiction.
It’s pretty much agreed that Gothic novels first appeared in the 1700s, but I haven’t read any from that century (yet). They include Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), among others.
There’s also the Southern Gothic genre that includes such novels as William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932), Carson McCullers’ Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood (1952), and Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark (1968).
What are your favorite Gothic novels, whether I mentioned them or not? I know there are a number of books in that genre I didn’t name.
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Dave Astor on Literature 