Renaissance Woman Issue 2

Welcome to October!! I trust you all woke up at the crack of dawn today with the express purpose of purchasing a PSL and a pumpkin pie scented candle from Yankee Candle Co. #JustGirlyThings Or perhaps your enthusiasm for October is a bit more subtle…

Either way, I have some ideas lined up for Renaissance Woman this month but will be making this newsletter a short one. If you haven’t seen the supplement that went out covering some of my favorite Halloween movies, you can check it out here.

The ‘Northanger Horrid Novels’: The 7 Once Lost Gothic Books Referenced in Northanger Abbey

Of the 10 gothic books referenced by characters in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, a novel that parodies sensationalist gothic romances popular at the time, 7 of the titles mentioned were long thought to have been the creation of the author’s imagination until they were rediscovered in the 1920s by a peculiar clergyman (a man quite fixated on the occult and supernatural btw) named Montague Summers, as well as British publisher Michael Sadleir. It is not clear to me upon research, however, if they worked jointly on the discovery or if each was responsible for unearthing a few of the 7 books separately around the same time. All but 2 of these 7 rediscovered gothic novels had originally been published by a fairly prolific publisher of gothic fiction in the 18th and 19th century, Minerva Press. The 7 rediscovered ‘Northanger Horrid Novels’ were only recently reprinted by Valancourt Books beginning in 2014. The books are as follows:

1. Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) by Eliza Parsons

2. Clermont (1798) by Regina Maria Roche

3. The Mysterious Warning, a German Tale (1796) by Eliza Parsons

4. The Necromancer; or, The Tale of the Black Forest (1794) by "Ludwig Flammenberg" (pseudonym for Carl Friedrich Kahlert)

5. The Midnight Bell (1798) by Francis Lathom

6. The Orphan of the Rhine (1798) by Eleanor Sleath

7. Horrid Mysteries (1796), which is an abridged translation by Peter Will of the Marquis de Grosse's The Genius.

The other 3 more well known books mentioned in Northanger Abbey were the widely known novels of The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk, and The Italian

Dear creature! How much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we will read The Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.

Have you, indeed! How glad I am! – What are they all?

I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocket-book. Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time.

… but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?

Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read every one of them.

Several Slightly Lesser Known Gothic Novels Part 1

When speaking about gothic literature there are a number of foundational texts we hear associated with the genre over and over again (Frankenstein, Dracula, Jane Eyre, Rebecca, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Castle of Otranto, The Turn of the Screw, etc). I wanted to provide a few gothic book recommendations throughout the month that you may be less familiar with.

• Trilby by George du Maurier (1895) - Written by Daphne Du Maurier’s grandfather, this novella is more seeped in pop culture than you may realize. Trilby has no less than 7 film adaptations and is where the term ‘Svengali’ was coined to mean a “person who exercises a controlling or mesmeric influence on another, especially for a sinister purpose”.

• The Elementals by Michael McDowell (1981) - A southern gothic, haunted house novel written by the man responsible for the screenplay of Beetlejuice. Enough said.

• Dragonwyck by Anya Seton (1944) - The story of a young provincial girl who falls in love with a distantly related wealthy man with sinister motives. This novel was adapted to film with Gene Tierney and Vincent Price in 1946.

25 Short Classic Gothic or Otherwise Spooky Books & Plays (200 Pages or Less)

If you want to get the most out of Halloween reading here are some compact (but still good!) novellas/short stories/plays that you can cram in with your other seasonal reading plans.

1. Arsenic and Old Lace by Joseph Kesselring

2. Carmilla by Sheridan LeFanu

3. On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts by Thomas De Quincy

4. Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo

5. Psycho by Robert Block

6. Rappaccini’s Daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

7. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

8. The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde

9. The Case Against Satan by Ray Russell

10. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

11. The Crucible by Arthur Miller

12. The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury

13. The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells

14. The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells

15. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

16. The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

17. The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell

18. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

19. The Sandman by E. T. A. Hoffmann

20. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

21. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

22. The Vampire Maid by Hume Nisbet

23. The Vampyre by John William Polidori

24. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

25. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

“Spooky” Books I’ve Read So Far This Season

• Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo - 4 Stars

• Crooked House by Agatha Christie - 3.5 Stars

• Mary Reilly by Valerie Martin - 3.5 Stars

• Ten Days in a Mad-House by Nellie Bly - 3.5 Stars

• The Vampire Maid by Hume Nisbet - 4 Stars

• The Diviners by Libba Bray - 3.5 Stars

• The Professor and The Madman by Simon Winchester - 3.75 Stars

Currently Reading

• The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

• A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

• An Adventure by C.A.E. Moberly & E.F. Jordain