50 Fun Facts About Gothic Literature

Which 1764 novel, passed off by Horace Walpole as a translated Italian manuscript, is called the first Gothic novel?

The Castle of Otranto was published anonymously with a title page crediting an invented Italian canon and a fictitious English translator, William Marshal. Walpole only admitted authorship in the second edition.

Which jilted Dickens character stopped every clock at Satis House and wore her wedding dress for decades?

Miss Havisham in Great Expectations stopped the clocks at twenty minutes to nine, the exact moment she received her fiance's jilting letter, and left the wedding cake rotting on the table.

Which 1938 Daphne du Maurier novel opens with the line 'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again'?

Rebecca never names its narrator, a shy young woman who marries the widower Maxim de Winter and finds his Cornish estate still ruled by the memory of his first wife, whose name the book carries instead.

Anne Rice objected to which actor's casting as Lestat in the 1994 Interview with the Vampire film, then recanted?

Tom Cruise struck Rice as all wrong for Lestat, and she said so in the press; after a pre-release screening she phoned him to say she had been wrong. Brad Pitt played the narrator and Kirsten Dunst the child vampire Claudia.

John Polidori, whose tale The Vampyre grew out of the wet summer of 1816, travelled with Lord Byron in what capacity?

Polidori was Byron's personal physician, hired at 20 for the European tour that stalled at Lake Geneva. His suave vampire Lord Ruthven became the template for every aristocratic bloodsucker since.

The Woman in Black ran in the West End from 1989 to 2023, second in longevity only to which play?

Only The Mousetrap has outlasted it: Stephen Mallatratt's adaptation of Susan Hill's ghost story began at a small Scarborough theatre in 1987 and went on to give 13,232 performances in the West End.

The word doppelganger, a Gothic staple coined by the German novelist Jean Paul in 1796, literally means what?

Double-walker, or double-goer, is the literal sense: Jean Paul coined the word in a footnote to his novel Siebenkas, and the Gothic made the spectral double its favourite device, from Stevenson to Poe.

In du Maurier's 1938 Manderley novel, which housekeeper devoted to the dead first wife torments the new Mrs de Winter?

Mrs Danvers was lady's maid to the first Mrs de Winter and keeps her rooms as a shrine, needling the narrator that she will never match her predecessor. Judith Anderson's icy turn in the 1940 film fixed her in popular memory.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, which painter of the portrait that ages in Dorian's place is later murdered by him?

Basil Hallward is infatuated with his sitter and calls the portrait his best work; years later Dorian stabs him in front of the corrupted canvas. Lord Henry Wotton, by contrast, merely talks Dorian into ruin.

Bluebeard, whose bride unlocks a forbidden room of murdered wives, was first printed in 1697 by which French author?

Charles Perrault printed Bluebeard in his 1697 Histoires ou contes du temps passe beside Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. Its forbidden chamber haunts the Gothic: Jane Eyre likens Thornfield's top corridor to 'some Bluebeard's castle'.

In Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, which vampire tells his 200-year life story to a reporter in San Francisco?

Louis de Pointe du Lac was a grieving Louisiana plantation owner when Lestat turned him in 1791; his confession to 'the boy' with the tape recorder launched Rice's Vampire Chronicles in 1976.

Which 1975 Stephen King novel returns writer Ben Mears to a Maine town whose Marsten House now shelters a vampire?

'Salem's Lot grew from King wondering aloud over supper what would happen if Dracula returned to twentieth-century America; he has called the result Peyton Place meets Dracula.

Whose 2018 Netflix series recast The Haunting of Hill House as the story of the haunted Crain family?

Mike Flanagan kept only the house, the Dudleys and a few names, turning Jackson's 1959 novel into a family drama; he followed it with The Haunting of Bly Manor, drawn from Henry James.

Which former court reporter's Le Fantome de l'Opera, serialised in Le Gaulois from 1909, gave the Paris Opera its phantom?

Gaston Leroux, a court reporter turned novelist, built his Phantom around the real Palais Garnier, whose underground cistern 'lake' and a chandelier counterweight that really fell he folded into the plot.

Which 1851 Hawthorne novel follows the Pyncheon family, living under an old curse in New England?

The House of the Seven Gables stands on land Colonel Pyncheon seized from Matthew Maule, who cursed the family from the gallows; Hawthorne's own ancestors had played a part in the Salem witch trials of 1692.

Which author of 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find' kept a flock of peafowl at her Georgia farm, Andalusia?

Flannery O'Connor wrote an essay on her birds called 'The King of the Birds' and worked peacock imagery into her fiction; lupus confined her to Andalusia, near Milledgeville, from 1951 until her death at 39.

Which director's 2015 Crimson Peak traps its heroine in Allerdale Hall, a Cumberland mansion sinking into red clay?

Guillermo del Toro named the estate for the warm red clay that leaches up from the mine and stains the winter snow, so the house appears to bleed; he has called the film a ghost story and Gothic romance.

Stevenson said the core of Jekyll and Hyde, 'a voluntary change becoming involuntary', came to him how?

It arrived in a dream: Stevenson's wife woke him as he cried out in his sleep and he complained she had interrupted 'a fine bogey tale'. He wrote the first draft in days while bedridden in Bournemouth.

In which Jane Austen novel does Isabella Thorpe recommend seven 'horrid novels' that were all real books?

Northanger Abbey is Austen's Gothic parody: Catherine Morland reads so much Radcliffe that she suspects her host of murdering his wife. Isabella's seven titles had sunk so far from view that one was thought to exist only in Austen's pages.

In Horace Walpole's 1764 novel, Prince Manfred's son Conrad is crushed on his wedding day by what falling object?

A giant helmet drops from nowhere, fulfilling a prophecy that the castle will pass from Manfred's line when its true owner grows too large to live in it. It matches the one on a marble statue inside the church.

Jekyll and Hyde drew on which Edinburgh cabinet-maker and councillor who was secretly a burglar by night?

Deacon Brodie robbed the shops he fitted locks for to fund mistresses and gambling, and was hanged in 1788; Stevenson co-wrote a play about him before splitting the respectable citizen into two men.

Matthew Lewis claimed to have written which 1796 shocker, the tale of the devout Ambrosio's downfall, in just ten weeks?

The Monk made its twenty-year-old author so notorious he was nicknamed 'Monk' Lewis for life; the fourth edition of 1798 cut the passages critics found objectionable, but the Devil still claims its Capuchin abbot, Ambrosio.

Which alias, a saint plus his great-uncle Maturin's Gothic wanderer, did Oscar Wilde adopt in France after prison?

Sebastian Melmoth fused the arrow-pierced Saint Sebastian with the soul-selling hero of Melmoth the Wanderer; Maturin, a Dublin clergyman, was Wilde's great-uncle by marriage, and Wilde died under the alias in Paris in 1900.

In Le Fanu's 1872 novella Carmilla, the vampire's other names Millarca and Mircalla are what, relative to her name?

Anagrams are the Countess Karnstein's one rule: every identity she adopts across the centuries rearranges the letters of Mircalla. Le Fanu's lesbian vampire beat Dracula into print by a quarter of a century.

For which 1794 novel did Ann Radcliffe's publisher pay an unheard-of £500, when a manuscript usually earned about £10?

The Mysteries of Udolpho made Radcliffe the most popular novelist in England; her next book earned £800 and made her the highest-paid professional writer of the 1790s, after which she published no more fiction in her lifetime.

In Ann Radcliffe's most popular novel, the wax corpse that makes the heroine faint lies hidden behind what?

A black veil hides the figure, which the heroine takes for a murdered woman's body until the last chapters reveal it as wax, made for a past owner's penance. It is Radcliffe's 'explained supernatural' at work.

Ann Radcliffe's posthumous essay split Gothic fear into which two emotions, one expanding the soul and one freezing it?

Terror and horror, she argued, are opposites: terror's uncertainty 'awakens the faculties', while horror's explicit gore 'contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them'. Her camp got terror; Lewis's got horror.

Which composer turned Henry James's The Turn of the Screw into a chamber opera premiered in Venice in 1954?

Benjamin Britten premiered it at Teatro La Fenice with an orchestra of just 13 players; the governess, the ghosts Quint and Jessel, and the children Miles and Flora are all sung, so the ghosts get voices the novella withholds.

Which 1936 Daphne du Maurier novel, set on Bodmin Moor around 1815, centres on a gang of Cornish wreckers?

Jamaica Inn was born of du Maurier's 1930 stay at the real pub, which still trades on Bodmin Moor; orphan Mary Yellan discovers her uncle leads the wreckers who lure ships onto the rocks.

In which 1930 Faulkner story do the townsfolk of Jefferson force a locked bedroom and find the long-dead Homer Barron?

A Rose for Emily ends with a strand of iron-grey hair on the pillow beside the body, revealing that Miss Grierson had slept beside the body for years. It was Faulkner's first story in a national magazine.

Faulkner set most of his Southern Gothic fiction in which invented Mississippi county, modelled on Lafayette County?

Yoknapatawpha County is Faulkner's home ground with the names changed, Oxford becoming Jefferson; he called it 'my apocryphal county' and drew its map himself for Absalom, Absalom!

In Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, which lonely guest invited by Dr Montague becomes the house's target?

Eleanor Vance, who resented the years spent nursing her demanding mother, sees and hears what the other guests miss, and Jackson never settles whether the house or her own mind is to blame. The 1959 novel was a National Book Award finalist.

Which 1962 Shirley Jackson novel is narrated by 'Merricat' Blackwood, whose family died of arsenic?

We Have Always Lived in the Castle was Jackson's last novel: Merricat, her agoraphobic sister Constance and Uncle Julian live walled off from a village that believes Constance put the arsenic in the sugar bowl.

In Susan Hill's The Woman in Black, where is Arthur Kipps marooned when Nine Lives Causeway floods at high tide?

Eel Marsh House stands on a tidal island beyond Crythin Gifford. Its ghost, Jennet Humfrye, watched from a window as the pony trap carrying her young son sank into the marsh on the causeway.

Which 1812 Byron poem, of which he said 'I awoke one morning and found myself famous', launched the Byronic hero?

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage gave Gothic fiction its signature villain-hero: world-weary, guilty and magnetic, a type drawn from Byron himself, famously summed up as 'mad, bad and dangerous to know'.

Which Irish-born writer's 1757 Enquiry made pain, danger and obscurity the sources of the sublime?

Edmund Burke held that the sublime is the strongest emotion the mind can feel, that whatever excites ideas of pain and danger evokes it, and that it needs obscurity, which is why Gothic castles are always dark.

Varney the Vampire, an 876-page penny dreadful of 1845-47, is credited as the first story to give a vampire what?

Sharpened fangs arrive with Sir Francis Varney, who leaves two puncture wounds in a sleeping victim's neck yet walks about freely in daylight. The serial sprawled because its author was paid by the line.

Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street, first appeared in which penny-dreadful serial of 1846-47?

The String of Pearls, subtitled A Domestic Romance and probably written by James Malcolm Rymer, introduced the barber whose customers vanished through a trapdoor into Mrs Lovett's pie shop.

Whose 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber recast Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast and Red Riding Hood as Gothic tales?

Angela Carter's title story gives Bluebeard's bride a mother who bursts in and shoots the husband, where the old tale sent her brothers; the collection won the Cheltenham Festival Literary Prize.

Which vast, decaying castle, home to the ritual-bound Groan family, gives Mervyn Peake's Gothic trilogy its name?

Gormenghast is a city-sized castle where the heir Titus Groan is born into centuries of meaningless ceremony while the kitchen boy Steerpike schemes his way up; Titus Groan appeared in 1946 and Peake's death cut the series short.

Freud's essay 'The Uncanny' dissects which E. T. A. Hoffmann tale of the student Nathanael and the automaton Olimpia?

The Sandman gave Freud his model of the uncanny, the familiar turned strange: Nathanael falls for a clockwork girl and is haunted by a childhood bogeyman who steals children's eyes. Offenbach set it in The Tales of Hoffmann.

Which Scottish poet, the 'Ettrick Shepherd', wrote the 1824 Confessions of a Justified Sinner, haunted by Gil-Martin?

James Hogg's anti-hero Robert Wringhim is egged on to murder by the shape-shifting Gil-Martin, who may be the Devil or a part of himself. Issued anonymously, the book sold poorly and lay neglected until André Gide praised it in 1947.

Which 1786 Gothic novel about a damned caliph did William Beckford write in French, with the English version out first?

Vathek appeared in Samuel Henley's English version as An Arabian Tale, claiming to be translated from Arabic, before Beckford's French original reached print. Its hero follows his appetites all the way to Eblis's hall of hell.

Which 1897 Richard Marsh novel about a shape-shifting Egyptian entity stalking an MP at first outsold Dracula?

The Beetle sold out its first printing but fell out of print after 1960, while Dracula, published the same year, never has. Its creature hunts Paul Lessingham over a priestess he killed while escaping an Egyptian cult.

Which 1818 Thomas Love Peacock satire lampoons Shelley as the lovelorn Scythrop Glowry and Coleridge as Mr Flosky?

Nightmare Abbey pokes fun at the gloom then fashionable in literature. Peacock wrote it at Marlow, where the Shelleys had been his neighbours.

The 'poisonous' yellow book that corrupts Dorian Gray is modelled on A rebours, the 1884 novel by which French author?

Joris-Karl Huysmans' A rebours, whose hero retreats into a private world of pure sensation, is never named in the novel; Wilde conceded at his 1895 trial that the book that corrupts Dorian was, or almost was, Huysmans's.

Which Gothic Revival villa at Twickenham did Horace Walpole build, the house that inspired his 1764 novel?

Strawberry Hill, rebuilt from 1749 with battlements, towers and turrets, gave its name to a whole style. So many sightseers came that Walpole grumbled he was keeping an inn and spent his days handing out tickets.

Which 2009 Sarah Waters novel draws Dr Faraday into the Ayres family's crumbling Warwickshire manor, Hundreds Hall?

The Little Stranger leaves it open whether Hundreds Hall is haunted or simply dying with the gentry after the war. Waters has said she set out to write about class in post-war Britain, not a ghost story.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote which 1892 story after enduring Silas Weir Mitchell's 'rest cure', and sent him a copy?

The Yellow Wallpaper shuts its narrator in an old nursery with barred windows, as the cure had shut Gilman away from pen and paper. Mitchell never acknowledged his copy, though she later claimed he had changed his methods.

Which woman from Byron's past caricatured him as the rakish title character of her 1816 novel Glenarvon?

Lady Caroline Lamb gave her ex-lover's stand-in the name Clarence de Ruthven. Polidori borrowed it for his vampire, in a tale its first publisher passed off as Byron's own.