The novel of the mysterious and the supernatural did not appear in modern literature until Horace Walpole wrote The Castle of Otranto in 1764, during the decade that was dominated by the realism of Smollett and Sterne. The author says it was an attempt to blend two kinds of romance, the ancient, which was all improbable, and the modern, which was a realistic copy of nature. The machinery of this novel is clumsy. An enormous helmet and a huge sword are the means by which an ancestor of Otranto, long since dead, restores the castle to a seeming peasant, who proves to be the rightful heir.
This book produced no imitators until 1777, when Clara Reeve wrote The Old English Baron, which was plainly suggested by Walpole's novel, but is more delicate in the treatment of its ghostly visitants. Here, as in The Castle of Otranto, the rightful heir has been brought up a peasant, ignorant of his high birth. Again his ancestors, supposedly dead and gone, bring him into his own. One night he is made to sleep in the haunted part of the castle, where his parents reveal to him in a dream things which he is later able to prove legally. He learns the truth about his birth, comes into his estate, and wins the lady of his heart. When he returns to the castle as its master, all the doors fly open through the agency of unseen hands to welcome their feudal lord.
The characters of both these novels are without interest, and the mysterious element fails to produce the slightest creepy thrill.
Twelve years passed before Walpole's novel found another imitator in Mrs. Ann Radcliffe, who so far excelled her two predecessors that she has been called the founder of the Gothic romance, and in this field she remains without a peer. In her first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, as in The Old English Baron by Clara Reeve, a peasant renowned for his courage and virtue loves and is beloved by a lady of rank. A strawberry mark on his arm proves that he is the Baron Malcolm and owner of the castle of Dunbayne, at which juncture amid great rejoicings the story ends.
The characters and the style foreshadow Mrs. Radcliffe's later work. The usurping Baron of Dunbayne, who has imprisoned in his castle the women who might oppose his ambition; the two melancholy widows; their gentle and pensive daughters; their brave, loyal, and virtuous sons in love respectively with the two daughters; the Count Santmorin, bold and passionate, who endeavours by force to carry off the woman he loves—these are types that Mrs. Radcliffe repeatedly developed until in her later novels they became real men and women with strong conflicting emotions.
But superior to all her other powers is her ability to awaken a feeling of the presence of the supernatural. The castle of Dunbayne has secret doors and subterranean passages. The mysterious sound, as of a lute, is wafted on the air from an unknown source. Alleyn, in endeavouring to escape through a secret passage, stumbles over something in the dark, and, on stooping to learn what it is, finds the cold hand of a corpse in his grasp. This dead man has nothing to do with the story, but is introduced merely to make the reader shudder, which Mrs. Radcliffe never fails to do, even after we have learned all the secrets of her art. We learn later in the book how the corpse happened to be left here unburied; for in that day of intense realism, half-way between the ancient belief in ghosts and the modern interest in mental suggestion, every occurrence outside the known laws of physics was greeted with a cynical smile. But, although Mrs. Radcliffe always explains the mystery in her books, we hold our breath whenever she designs that we shall.
The Sicilian Romance, The Romance of the Forest, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and The Italian were written and published during the next seven years and each one shows a marked artistic advance over its predecessor. With the opening paragraph of each, we are carried at once into the land of the unreal, into regions of poetry rather than of prose. Rugged mountains with their concealed valleys, whispering forests which the eye cannot penetrate, Gothic ruins with vaulted chambers and subterranean passages, are the scenes of her stories; while event after event of her complicated plot happens either just as the mists of evening are obscuring the sun, or while the moonlight is throwing fantastic shadows over the landscape. It is an atmosphere of mystery in which one feels the weird presence of the supernatural. This is heightened by the ghostly suggestions she brings to the mind, as incorporeal as spirits. A low hurried breathing in the dark, lights flashing out from unexpected places, forms gliding noiselessly along the dark corridors, a word of warning from an unseen source, cause the reader to wait with hushed attention for the unfolding of the mystery.
Sometimes the solution is trivial. The reader and the inmates of Udolpho are held in suspense chapter after chapter by some terrible appearance behind a black veil. When Emily ventures to draw the curtain, she drops senseless to the ground. But this appearance turns out to be merely a wax effigy placed there by chance. Often the explanation is more satisfactory. The disappearance of Ludovico during the night from the haunted chamber where he was watching in hopes of meeting the spirits that infested it, makes the most sceptical believe for a time in the reality of the ghostly visitants; and his reappearance at the close of the book, the slave of pirates who had found a secret passage leading from the sea to this room, and had used it as a place of rendezvous, is declared by Sir Walter Scott to meet all the requirements of romance.