Garish Supernatural Horror: The Abbess

In our fouth episode of Reading the Gothic we look at one of the most extravagant, sensational and sexually charged Gothic novels, William Henry Ireland's The Abbess. From its conception in 1764 with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto the Gothic genre has lurched from terror in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho to sheer horror in Mathew Lewis's The Monk, but in 1799 the notorious Shakespeare forger Ireland turned his attention from the Bard to the Gothic writing what critics call the most voluptuous and salacious novel, The Abbess: A Romance.