Novel
The Castle of Otranto
Horace Walpole · 1764
Synopsis
On the day of his wedding to Isabella, Conrad, the sickly son of Manfred, prince of Otranto, is found in the courtyard crushed beneath a helmet a hundred times larger than any human helmet. A young peasant, Theodore, notices that it resembles the one on the black marble statue of Alfonso the Good in the nearby church; Manfred calls him a magician and has him shut up beneath the very helmet. Then he tells Isabella that he is repudiating his wife and wants to marry her in order to have an heir. The girl flees through an underground passage leading to the church.
Context
The book appeared on Christmas Eve 1764, dated 1765, from a London bookseller and not from its author's private press. It presented itself as the translation, by a certain William Marshal, of an Italian work by Onuphrio Muralto printed in Naples in 1529 and found in the library of an old Catholic family of northern England; translator and author were invented. In the second edition, in April 1765, Walpole acknowledged himself and apologised for having taken these masks; he added the subtitle A Gothic Story, from which the genre is said to date.
Who it is for
A short novel, of one hundred and fifty to two hundred pages depending on the edition; in French, the translation by Dominique Corticchiato has been reissued since 1943.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the first Gothic novel in the English language; The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Monk belong to the genre it opens.
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