Gothic novels | Thornfield Hall

I am a fan of Gothic novels.

It began with the so-called “Gothic novels” of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. There was romance, there was travel, and a heroine’s investigation of a crime in an exotic location. She usually has two suitors, one a charmer, the other more rugged. N.B. The charmer is usually the criminal.

Among the most popular Gothic writers were Mary Stewart, Phyllis A. Whitney, Victoria Holt, and Dorthy Eden. You could recognize the genre by the cover illustration. Above, a woman in an evening gown or negligee is running from something or someone. Below, a woman dressed for lunch, or the office, descends a steep trail to the beach under a full moon. Her dress looks stylish, though it might not do for a dolphin rescue.

The best of these Gothic novelists is Mary Stewart, a charming, intelligent writer who is also an unwitting travel writer, setting each of her books in a different country. In This Rough Magic, the heroine, Lucy, an actress, is visiting her sister in Corfu. During her stay, she saves a beached dolphin, quotes Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and uncovers a smuggling racket. (The crime in Mary Stewart’s novels is quite often smuggling.)

But of course these 20th-century Gothics do not resemble the original Gothic novels of the 18th and 19th centuries. I am not a fan of Ann Radcliffe or Horace Walpole, but I love Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, a satire of Gothic novels.

J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, one of my favorite Victorian novels, is superb and suspenseful, and stands out from the rest of the Gothics. Le Fanu, a prolific Irish writer of short stories, historical novels, mysteries, and Gothic novels, is remembered for Uncle Silas and his ghost stories.

Let me just say, Uncle Silas is one of the most sinister characters in English literature. Silas, once accused of murdering a guest in his house, though the crime was never proved, is shunned by society, and has a reputation as a gambler and flim flam man. Now that he is old, he presents himself as a religious man, but that is a humbug. He is an impecunious opium addict who also drinks a lot.

And then there is an uproar. Silas is named the guardian of his niece Maud, a 17-year-old heiress, in a codicil to his brother’s will. Maud’s father never believed the charges against Uncle Silas, and Maud is prepared to think well of him.. Unfortunately, as Maud will learn, her father’s confidence in Silas was misplaced.

The structure of Uncle Silas is a clever double narrative. There are two first-person narrators, both of them named Maud Ruthyn, who are one and the same person, at different ages. On the first page, after describing Maud as “slight and rather tall, with a great deal of golden hair, dark grey-eyed, and with a countenance rather sensitive and melancholy,” the adult Maud adds, “I was that girl.”

The adult Maud recounts the details of her dangerous sojourn with Uncle Silas. .Although we see most of the action through the heiress’s eyes, the adult Maud’s occasional remarks deepen our understanding..

One by one, Silas banishes Maud’s friends, including his own daughter, Milly, whom he sends to school in France. He forbids Maud to visit her middle-aged Cousin Monica, who is very concerned about her living with Silas, and then she is not allowed to leave the estate. Maud realizes she is a prisoner, and becomes terrified. Fortunately, a few of the employees are her friends, and try to help her, though this is almost impossible. There are spies everywhere.

At one point, a wicked French governess – one who, ironically, had been fired by Maud’s father – has locked Maud in a room with barred windows in a disused wing of the house. Le Fanu’s spare prose is curiously theatrical and effective as he describes her despair. Even with the cliches, it is a brilliant piece of writing.

Le Fanu writes, “I did not lie down; but I despaired. I walked round and round the room, wringing my hands in utter distraction. I threw myself at the bed-side on my knees. I could not pray. I could only shiver and moan, with hands clasped, and eyes of horror turned up to heaven….”

This elegant, exciting book can be devoured in a few days, if you have a few days off – or in a month – who cares? It’s fabulous!

By the way, the heroine of Le Fanu’s novel The Rose and the Key is also named Maud. Perhaps it’s significant? In fact, all the women’s names in Uncle Silas being with “M.” Clever, though I don’t quite know the meaning of this alliteration.

Gothic novels are thrilling. When we recall the intoxicating pleasures of the Gothic, we think of 18th- and 19th-century ghost stories, haunted castles, secret passages, unexplained lights wavering, and supernatural phenomena revealed to be the product of human agency.

Victorian writers manipulated these tropes to great effect. In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, a mad woman escapes from the attic and terrorizes Jane and Mr. Rochester. In Charlotte’s later novel, Villette, the teacher Lucy Snowe sees the ghost of a nun in an attic and later is drugged by the villainous headmistress/owner of the school. In The Rose and the Key, by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Maud Vernon thinks she is going to a party only to find herself kidnapped and locked in an insane asylum.

In the twentieth century, Gothic tropes remained vigorous. Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County is full of grotesque Southern characters and suffused with a moody atmosphere. In Shirley Jackson’s novels and short stories, there are haunted houses, good families gone bonkers, and ignorant villagers who will stone a person as soon as look at him.

But what interests me this summer is the renaissance of women’s Gothic novels in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. If you have read Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt, Phyllis Whitney, Dorothy Eden, and Anne Maybury, you know these engrossing mysteries with Gothic elements. The heroines travel, visit mansions, meet very masculine men, solve murders, and investigate crimes, but are often startled by strange, unexplained apparitions. And, of course, there is romance. Falling in love is probably the most common trope in the history of the English novel.

These mid-century Gothics are now reclassified as romantic suspense. Perhaps the term Gothic no longer sells. These heroines do meet attractive men – quite often two, as in Mary Stewart’s This Rough Magic – but there is the Gothic possibility that one of the men is himself the murderer/smuggler.

The most elegant of these Gothic writers is Mary Stewart, who published her first novel, Madam, Will You Talk?, in 1955. I am fond of My Brother Michael, published in 1959, and recently reread it. In this Gothic thriller, the heroine, Camilla Haven, a Latin teacher, travels alone on vacation in Greece. Camilla’s solitary trip goes about as well as these things can, until a Greek man approaches her in a cafe in Athens and insists on giving her the keys to a hired car. She did not hire the car, but he says it was for Simon in Delphi, “a matter of life and death.”

But before I go on, let me share the Author’s Note, which shows Mary Stewart’s intellectualism and knowledge of Greek literature – and how she differs from the Gothic writers of her time.

She writes,

The quotations from Professor Gilbert Murray’s translation of the Electra of Euripides appear by kind permission of Messrs. Allen & Unwin. I am also indebted to the editors of the Penguin Classics for permission to use extracts from Sophocles and Euripides in translations by E. E. Warling and Philip Vellacott; to Messrs. Faber and Faber for their leave to use the lines from Dudley Fitts’ translation of The Frogs by Aristophanes…

Stewart often uses the quotations as epigraphs, or interweaves them in the text. The following epigraph in Chapter 1 draws attention to Camilla’s character, as it complements the opening passage.

Why, woman,
What are you waiting for?
Sophocles: “Electra”
(tr. E. E Watling)

“Nothing ever happens to me.”
I wrote the words slowly, looked at them for a moment with a little sigh, then put my ballpoint pen down on the cafe table and rummaged in my handbag for a cigarette.

An amusing, brilliant opening of a novel!

Camilla dithers when the Greek drops the car key on the table, but she is running short of money and has longed to go to Delphi, so she takes the car – Delphi is so small she should be able to find Simon, she reasons. And along the way there is much humor, because she is not an experienced driver, and has a few adventures en route – including an encounter with a macho bus driver who will not let her pass.

Simon Lester, an Englishman, the only Simon in Delphi, has not hired the car but tries to help her find the other Simon. (There is none.) There is a natural sympathy between them: Simon is a classics teacher and housemaster, while Camilla, of course, teaches Latin. As Camilla wryly tells Simon, she is not quite a classicist, because at girls’ schools only Latin is taught. And, so, yes, the man who knows Greek is acknowledged by Camilla as superior, which is, by the way, unusual in Stewart’s books. But quiet Camilla becomes stronger as the plot unravels – and God knows she has to use her wits, because Simon is investigating the murder of his brother Michael 14 years ago in Greece, where he was stationed during World War II and then worked in the Greek resistance. Stewart also outlines the fascinating history of the war and the resistance in Greece.

Before I go, I must describe one of Stewart’s travel scenes: she is a natural travel writer, and traveled in order to set her novels in different countries. At night, Camilla and Simon visit the temple at Delphi. It is a magical experience. And then in the small theater, Simon, at Camilla’s request, recites some Greek. He chooses a passage from Sophocles’s Electra. The acoustics are marvelous, and the passage evocative. The spirits of the ancient Greeks seem eerily present. This is a charming, brilliant novel, which I cannot recommend too highly. I would call it a mystery with Gothic elements, rather than a pure Gothic novel. But that is often true of this particular subset of women’s novels. I will, however, post soon about a purely Gothic novel of the ’60s.

If you enjoyed this, let me know, and look forward to more posts on the Gothic reading experience.