The origins of most literary genres are lost, either in scholarly controversy or the dark backward and abysm of time, but the Gothic novel presents an admirable clarity. The antiquarian and aesthete Horace Walpole, inspired by a nightmare involving “a gigantic hand in armour,” wrote a novella-length narrative published in December 1764 as The Castle of Otranto. It was akin to similar forgeries evoking the Middle Ages that appeared in the 1760s, like James Macpherson’s “translations” of Ossian and Thomas Chatterton’s Rowley poems. But unlike the other forgeries, Otranto had legs: it stimulated the historical romance, developed by Clara Reeve in The Old English Baron (1777) and Sophia Lee in The Recess (1783–1785), which reached something like canonical status with the medieval romances of Walter Scott.
The supernatural terror Walpole’s tale evoked took longer to erupt. It was not until the last decade of the eighteenth century that thrilling...
