What Is Gothic Fiction?

In the dim corridors of literary history, few genres cast as long and labyrinthine a shadow as Gothic fiction. Emerging in the late eighteenth century amid the twilight of the Enlightenment, the Gothic brought with it a torrent of specters, crypts, ancient lineages, and unspeakable secrets. It conjured ruins not only of architecture but of consciousness—buildings that crumbled alongside minds, and bloodlines poisoned by the very memory of what they had repressed. Long dismissed as sensationalist or feminine, Gothic fiction has, in recent decades, reasserted itself as a potent cultural form: one that articulates deep anxieties about the self, the family, history, religion, sexuality, and the fragile limits of human reason.

And yet, for all its critical resurgence, the early Gothic—the period stretching roughly from 1764 to 1820—remains too often reduced to a list of “foundational” texts cited more than they are read. When it is invoked, it tends to be either as an origin point to be surpassed or a quarry of tropes to be reused: a haunted house at the edge of the literary village, whose doors few dare to re-enter with fresh eyes. Even H. P. Lovecraft, one of the twentieth century’s most influential horror writers and critics, treated the early Gothic as a necessary but primitive precursor to what he considered a higher form of horror—the “weird tale,” with its cosmic vistas and metaphysical unease.

This essay seeks to reopen those doors.

By returning to the early Gothic texts with care—and through the refracting lens of Lovecraft’s seminal critical work, Supernatural Horror in Literature—this study aims to do more than revisit the canon. It hopes to engage in a critical reevaluation of both the texts themselves and of Lovecraft’s influence as a bibliographer and gatekeeper of horror literature. Rather than simply cataloguing early examples, we will ask: What assumptions about horror, rationality, gender, and aesthetics governed Lovecraft’s judgments? Which texts did he elevate, and why? Which did he ignore or dismiss? And how might a broader, more capacious view of the Gothic—as a form constantly morphing across historical, geographic, and ideological boundaries—allow us to more fully understand the deep roots of weird fiction?

In doing so, this essay hopes to make a contribution not just to genre taxonomy, but to the critical understanding of how literary horror evolves—and how it is shaped by those who seek to define it. The Gothic is not merely an ancestral ruin to be preserved or a cultural relic to be pitied; it is a living architecture, still haunted, still whispering through the walls.

Purpose and Scope of This Study

The aim of this study is not merely to revisit the foundational texts of Gothic fiction, nor to compile an exhaustive catalogue of early works in the genre. Rather, it is to interrogate the legacy and critical framework established by H. P. Lovecraft’s 1927 essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature, and to examine how his account of early Gothic fiction both reveals and obscures the full terrain of weird literature’s origins.

Lovecraft’s essay, though often read today as a historical overview of supernatural fiction, is not a neutral survey. It is a canon-building document, a manifesto of taste and metaphysics, written by an author deeply invested in a particular conception of horror—one grounded in cosmic fear, the insignificance of humanity, and the violation of natural law. His preferences are overt: he favors what is unexplainable over what is revealed, what is metaphysical over what is moral, and what is intellectually terrifying over what is emotionally or sensually disturbing. As a result, his critical lineage tends to favor writers who align with his own aesthetic and philosophical vision—such as Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Lord Dunsany—while downplaying or omitting those whose work resists or complicates such frameworks.

This project, then, adopts a double strategy:

First, it treats Lovecraft’s essay seriously—as a foundational yet ideologically charged map of horror’s literary development. We will unpack his readings of the early Gothic texts he includes, considering what values and anxieties shape his commentary.

Second, it challenges and expands that map by reintroducing early works of Gothic or weird literature that Lovecraft minimizes, overlooks, or fails to engage. These include not only canonical figures such as Poe and Le Fanu, whose influence on weird fiction is now widely acknowledged, but also less-known or marginalized writers such as Count Eric Stenbock, R. Murray Gilchrist, and Jan Potocki, whose work occupies a vital place in the haunted architecture of the genre.

By doing so, we hope to contribute to the ongoing critical reevaluation of Gothic fiction, not as a set of static texts or tropes, but as a shifting mode of engagement with fear, estrangement, and the boundaries of the self. Lovecraft’s legacy is immense—but it is also partial. To revisit early Gothic fiction through his lens is to see how the modern horror canon was shaped—but to step outside that lens is to rediscover how strange, varied, and rich the Gothic tradition truly was.

In the next section, we will examine the nature and structure of Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature, not only as a bibliographic essay, but as a theoretical argument about the aims and function of supernatural fiction.

An Ideological Map of Horror

H. P. Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature is, at first glance, a sweeping survey of the weird and ghostly across centuries of Anglophone fiction. First published in 1927 and later revised substantially through the 1930s, it has since taken on an authoritative weight in discussions of horror’s literary genealogy. Yet it is more than a historical essay. It is a critical manifesto, an aesthetic declaration, and—perhaps above all—a coded autobiography. The history it presents is inseparable from the worldview it embodies: a worldview in which fear, not reason, is the primal aesthetic experience, and where the highest function of literature is not entertainment but metaphysical disturbance.

The structure of the essay is deceptively straightforward. Lovecraft begins with a philosophical meditation on the nature of fear itself, famously declaring that “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” From this premise, he draws a distinction between mere ghost stories or thrillers and what he terms the “weird tale,” which aims to provoke not just surprise or suspense, but awe and existential dread. What follows is a chronologically arranged tour through various periods and practitioners of supernatural fiction, from Gothic pioneers like Walpole and Radcliffe, through Poe and the decadent writers of the late nineteenth century, and into the more metaphysically ambitious authors of Lovecraft’s own time.

Beneath its scholarly surface, however, the essay is suffused with Lovecraft’s personal convictions—particularly his disdain for the rational explanation of supernatural phenomena, and his contempt for what he calls the “survivals of naive popular traditions” in ghost stories that rely too heavily on folklore, sentiment, or moral resolution. He privileges atmosphere, ambiguity, and the intrusion of the unknowable into an otherwise coherent world. These preferences are not merely aesthetic but ontological: they reflect Lovecraft’s own philosophical materialism and cosmic pessimism. In his eyes, the universe is indifferent, perhaps hostile, to human understanding; the most effective horror literature, therefore, is that which confronts this indifference without flinching.

This metaphysical commitment inevitably shapes his literary judgments. He is openly dismissive of writers whose tales explain away their mysteries—Ann Radcliffe chief among them—and those whose horrors are too personal, romantic, or socially grounded. While he nods to the historical importance of early Gothic novels, he tends to treat them as embryonic or unsophisticated compared to later works that evoke a sense of cosmic terror or esoteric dread. Lovecraft’s literary history is not neutral: it is a selective charting of a tradition that culminates, not coincidentally, in his own generation and aesthetic.

Yet even in its exclusions and distortions, Supernatural Horror in Literature offers an invaluable resource. It identifies key thematic continuities across disparate periods—especially the persistence of irrational or unknown forces breaching the surface of the everyday—and it foregrounds the emotional and psychological impact of horror, long before academic criticism took these aspects seriously. It also preserves fragments of now-forgotten authors, some of whom would likely have been lost entirely without Lovecraft’s evangelism.

At the same time, the essay’s omissions are telling. It gives only cursory attention to the role of gender, to the Gothic’s entanglement with political and religious critique, and to non-Anglophone sources of weird fiction. The female Gothic is treated with suspicion; decadent or queer fiction, where mentioned, is often aestheticized but not embraced. These gaps offer an opportunity—not simply to fault Lovecraft for his limitations, but to use his canon as a starting point from which to re-map the early Gothic, not as a prologue to weird fiction but as its parallel and equal foundation.

In this spirit, we now turn to the literary landscape of the early Gothic itself: a world of ruins, secrets, bloodlines, and blurred boundaries between reason and terror.

The Literary Landscape of Early Gothic Fiction (1760–1820)

The period in which Gothic fiction emerged was one of intense cultural transformation. From the mid-eighteenth century through the early decades of the nineteenth, Europe—especially Britain—experienced a collision of Enlightenment rationalism, Romantic individualism, and revolutionary violence. In this crucible of competing ideologies, Gothic fiction took shape not as a coherent genre but as an imaginative mode capable of expressing the fractures and fears of the age. It is no accident that the Gothic arose alongside the modern novel itself, or that its earliest works obsessively revisited the past, haunted the present, and questioned the very boundaries of the real.

At its birth, Gothic fiction stood in opposition to the reigning values of Neoclassicism and the Enlightenment. Where reason, clarity, and order had been exalted, the Gothic emphasized mystery, obscurity, and emotional excess. Its settings were often medieval—castles, abbeys, feudal estates—and its plots swirled with anachronism, placing modern readers within a superstitious and symbolically dense past. Yet this embrace of the medieval was not nostalgic; it was haunted, riddled with anxiety over power, decay, and the resurgence of what civilization had supposedly left behind.

The influence of the sublime, as theorized by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), cannot be overstated. Burke defined the sublime as that which inspires awe and terror in the face of vastness, obscurity, and danger. For Gothic writers, the sublime was not merely a landscape effect—it was a spiritual and psychological condition. It appeared in crumbling ruins and violent storms, but also in moments of interior crisis: the collapse of identity, the confrontation with mortality, the terrifying excess of desire.

Importantly, the early Gothic was never a single, unified tradition. It emerged through two major literary threads, often entangled but nonetheless distinct in emphasis and tone. The “female Gothic,” exemplified by writers like Ann Radcliffe, explored themes of entrapment, domestic tyranny, and emotional repression. Its heroines were frequently imprisoned—literally or figuratively—by patriarchal systems, and its terrors, though often rationalized in the end, carried deep psychological weight. In contrast, the “monkish” or “male Gothic,” as represented by Matthew Lewis’s The Monk or Beckford’s Vathek, reveled in the supernatural and the grotesque. These tales embraced actual demons, blasphemy, sexual perversion, and damnation, offering a much darker, more sensational aesthetic.

The sociopolitical context of these tales is crucial. The French Revolution had thrown Europe into chaos, overturning monarchies, reordering class hierarchies, and challenging the sanctity of religious and familial structures. Gothic fiction absorbed and refracted these upheavals. Its tyrannical abbots and haunted aristocrats were often veiled critiques of real-world corruption and absolutism. Its hidden manuscripts and ancestral secrets mirrored contemporary fears of historical erasure and ideological manipulation.

Simultaneously, the rise of the novel created a new reading public—especially among women—and with it a new market for fiction that could titillate and terrify without breaching social norms too overtly. Gothic fiction walked this line precariously. It both exploited and satirized the very moral frameworks it appeared to uphold. In this way, it became a remarkably flexible form: capable of conservative allegory or radical subversion, of moral parable or anti-rational rebellion.

Though often dismissed in its time as vulgar or ephemeral, the early Gothic proved remarkably resilient. It laid the groundwork not only for later horror and supernatural fiction, but for psychological realism, decadent literature, and the uncanny. As Lovecraft would later note—albeit with ambivalence—it was in these tales of hidden corridors, ancestral curses, and violated reason that the modern weird tale found its first literary habitation.

In the following section, we will examine how Lovecraft engaged with this early Gothic landscape—what texts he selected as foundational, and how his readings reveal the contours and limitations of his vision of horror.

The Early Gothic Canon According to Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft’s treatment of early Gothic fiction in Supernatural Horror in Literature is both appreciative and selective. He acknowledges its historical importance, even as he views it largely as a stage to be transcended. For Lovecraft, the Gothic period provided necessary scaffolding for the eventual emergence of more sophisticated weird fiction, but most of its output, in his view, lacked the depth of cosmic or psychological horror he deemed essential. As such, his account praises certain key works while subtly distancing himself from their narrative methods and philosophical underpinnings.

The Gothic novel that Lovecraft places at the point of origin is Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). He identifies it as “the first novel to incorporate the Gothic spirit in its purest form,” and commends Walpole for his bold innovation in fusing supernatural fantasy with the realistic structure of the modern novel. Yet Lovecraft also calls the book “crude,” emphasizing its melodramatic excesses and improbable events. For him, its merit lies less in artistic execution than in establishing the groundwork for what horror fiction could become.

Lovecraft is more ambivalent toward Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1777). He sees it as a deliberate softening of Walpole’s wild invention—a move toward plausibility and moral clarity. While he credits Reeve for refining the genre, he clearly prefers the wilder, more unrestrained elements of Walpole’s vision. In Reeve’s insistence on the rational and the decorous, Lovecraft finds a certain sterility.

The most detailed early commentary is reserved for Ann Radcliffe, whose The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and other novels he acknowledges as masterpieces of atmospheric terror. Lovecraft admires Radcliffe’s ability to evoke awe and suspense through natural settings and psychological tension. However, he criticizes her most defining trait: the explained supernatural. For Lovecraft, horror that resolves itself into mere coincidence or human deceit squanders the emotional investment of the reader. He views Radcliffe as an author whose sense of dread is genuine, but whose loyalty to rationalism undermines her own effects. It is a revealing judgment, one that mirrors Lovecraft’s broader philosophical rejection of the explainable.

In contrast, he shows clear enthusiasm for Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), calling it “a tale of diabolism, necromancy, and nameless horrors.” While Lovecraft typically disfavors sensationalism for its own sake, he makes an exception here, impressed by Lewis’s refusal to apologize for his grotesqueries. The novel’s supernatural events are not explained away; they are enacted with relish and abandon. Though Lovecraft notes its stylistic flaws, he praises The Monk for its willingness to plunge fully into the terrifying and the transgressive.

Similarly, William Beckford’s Vathek (1786) earns Lovecraft’s respect for its unique setting and atmosphere. Departing from the European Gothic landscape, Vathek immerses itself in Islamic esotericism, decadent philosophy, and supernatural damnation. Lovecraft appreciates its lush Orientalism and philosophical darkness, describing it as possessing “a persistent power and an atmosphere of sinister magnificence.” That Beckford’s vision is ultimately one of cosmic punishment for hubris aligns neatly with Lovecraft’s own moral metaphysics.

Finally, Lovecraft includes Charles Brockden Brown, often called the father of the American Gothic. Brown’s Wieland (1798) and Edgar Huntly (1799) are given brief but respectful mention. Lovecraft recognizes in Brown a more introspective, psychologically driven horror, even if he finds the prose turgid and the resolution too rational for his taste. Still, Brown’s emphasis on madness, inner disturbance, and narrative ambiguity would become central to later weird fiction.

Notably absent from Lovecraft’s account are other influential early figures: Mary Shelley, Charlotte Dacre, Regina Maria Roche, and numerous Continental writers whose work shaped the Gothic imagination. His selections prioritize texts that either align with his emphasis on genuine supernaturalism or those that anticipate his preferred themes—cosmic fear, forbidden knowledge, psychological unraveling. Where Gothic horror is too sentimental, too moral, or too socially embedded, Lovecraft turns away.

In his early Gothic canon, then, we see the contours of Lovecraft’s own aesthetics: a preference for atmosphere over plot, for the inexplicable over the resolved, and for metaphysical terror over emotional distress. His readings are illuminating, but also narrow. They privilege a particular trajectory of horror—one that leads, not surprisingly, to himself and his literary descendants.

To challenge this trajectory, and to understand the full diversity of early weird fiction, we must now look beyond Lovecraft’s map. The next section turns to those other early works—by authors he ignored or misjudged—which form a parallel and no less vital constellation in the dark sky of the Gothic tradition.

Other Early Works of Weird and Gothic Fiction

If Lovecraft’s early Gothic canon offers a compelling but narrow foundation for the weird tale, it is equally important to recognize the broader constellation of writers and texts that fall outside his gaze. Some were overlooked due to their cultural or linguistic distance; others because they embodied narrative strategies or thematic concerns that Lovecraft found unappealing—sentiment, sexuality, psychological ambiguity, or irony. Yet these works, many of which predate or run parallel to the familiar Gothic canon, offer alternative pathways into the weird, and they complicate any linear narrative of horror’s evolution.

Among the most conspicuous omissions is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), a work that, though often classed as science fiction, is profoundly Gothic in its architecture. Its landscapes—icy wastes, ruined castles, isolated laboratories—are as haunted as its themes: secrecy, forbidden knowledge, and the creature’s own tragic alienation. Lovecraft mentions Shelley briefly, but downplays her philosophical scope in favor of authors more explicitly aligned with supernaturalism. This is a revealing silence. Shelley’s horror is not otherworldly but existential, and in many ways anticipates the themes of inhumanity and cosmic indifference that Lovecraft himself would explore, albeit from a different angle.

Another rich but neglected figure is J. Sheridan Le Fanu, whose short stories—particularly Carmilla (1872), Green Tea, and Schalken the Painter—embody a sophisticated spectrality. Le Fanu’s ghosts do not erupt into melodrama; they linger, manifesting gradually and psychologically, often implicating their victims in ways that blur the line between haunting and guilt. Carmilla, with its overtly erotic undertones and atmospheric elegance, expands the vampire tradition beyond mere fear of death into a terrain of desire, repression, and social taboo. Though Lovecraft acknowledges Le Fanu in passing, he underestimates the depth and subtlety of his psychological horror.

The same might be said of Edgar Allan Poe, whose influence on weird fiction is incalculable. Though Lovecraft admired Poe deeply—perhaps even modeled aspects of his prose after him—he seemed determined to distinguish himself from Poe’s legacy, claiming that his own work dealt with cosmic horror while Poe’s dealt with morbid psychology. Yet this is an artificial distinction. Stories like The Fall of the House of Usher or MS. Found in a Bottle carry more than psychological unease; they tremble at the edge of the ontological abyss. Poe’s blend of decaying architecture, unreliable perception, and narrative claustrophobia laid groundwork not only for Lovecraft but for modern horror at large.

Among the stranger and more visionary early works is Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, a sprawling, nested narrative of travelers, occult rituals, haunted ruins, and shifting identities. Written in French by a Polish nobleman between 1794 and 1815, the novel defies easy categorization. It operates like a Borgesian labyrinth—stories within stories, some supernatural, others philosophical or erotic, all enveloped in uncertainty. Though it lacks the relentless atmosphere of dread that Lovecraft favored, its epistemological instability and dreamlike structure make it a quintessential Gothic experiment—one that anticipates the uncanny more than the terrifying.

Equally visionary, but much more neglected, are the works of Count Eric Stenbock and R. Murray Gilchrist, two decadent stylists writing in the late Victorian period. Their tales combine Gothic settings with queer sensibilities, mythic undertones, and poetic prose. Stenbock’s stories—such as The Other Side: A Breton Legend and The True Story of a Vampire—blur boundaries between life and death, self and other, often invoking the supernatural in ways that feel elegiac rather than horrific. Gilchrist’s stories, too, are steeped in landscape and longing, presenting horror as a function of beauty’s decay. For Lovecraft, whose own anxieties around gender and the body were pronounced, such work may have appeared decadent in the pejorative sense. For the modern reader, however, they offer a vital expansion of the Gothic’s emotional and symbolic range.

Finally, the influence of non-English traditions should not be underestimated. While Lovecraft drew primarily on British and American writers, the early weird tale has deep roots in German Romanticism, French decadent fiction, and Eastern European folklore. E.T.A. Hoffmann, Gérard de Nerval, Ludwig Tieck, and Théophile Gautier all explored themes of madness, doppelgängers, necromancy, and spectral lovers in ways that anticipated the uncanny as later theorized by Freud. Their work deserves a place alongside the Anglophone Gothic in any account of horror’s formative period.

Taken together, these neglected or marginalized figures suggest a Gothic tradition far stranger, more diverse, and more porous than Lovecraft allowed. They reveal that early weird fiction was not solely the province of cosmic horror or supernatural terror, but also of dream, metaphor, sexuality, and philosophical unease. If Lovecraft built a cathedral to the unknowable, these writers constructed catacombs of memory, mirrors, and unspoken desire. To understand the weird, we must walk through both.

In our concluding section, we will reflect on what this expanded view of the early Gothic tells us about horror’s literary legacy—and about the myths we inherit when we trace a genre through the eyes of its most famous disciples.

Reweaving the Map of Early Weird Literature

To return to the early Gothic through the lens of Lovecraft is to view the haunted landscape of horror literature both illuminated and distorted. His Supernatural Horror in Literature is an achievement of critical vision—wide in historical sweep, bracing in aesthetic judgment, and often profound in its identification of fear as the most primal literary impulse. Yet it is also a vision shaped by his own philosophical commitments: to cosmic indifference, to metaphysical dread, to the unexplainable as the truest mode of terror. In admiring what he elevates, we must also acknowledge what he excludes.

The early Gothic, as this essay has argued, is not merely a crude preface to modern horror, nor a set of antique curiosities whose purpose was to prepare the ground for the weird tale. It is a rich, heterogeneous terrain: a mode that speaks not only in shrieks and thunderclaps, but in whispers, sighs, and crumbling silences. It dramatizes not just the intrusion of the supernatural, but the more unsettling instability of the real. And while Lovecraft rightly recognized in works like The Monk, Vathek, and Wieland the germ of future terrors, he did so through a narrowing lens, one that privileged metaphysical awe over emotional, political, or psychological disquiet.

By revisiting neglected or underappreciated figures—Le Fanu, Stenbock, Gilchrist, Potocki, and others—we find alternate genealogies of weird fiction, ones that trace horror not only through terror and sublimity, but through decay, irony, sensuality, and melancholy. These writers reveal that horror’s power does not reside solely in the eruption of the alien or the vastness of cosmic dread, but also in the intimate hauntings of memory, desire, and transgression.

To reweave the map of early weird literature, then, is not to discard Lovecraft’s legacy, but to complicate it. His essay remains a monument—an imposing edifice in horror’s scholarly architecture—but like all Gothic structures, it casts shadows. In those shadows, other stories live: stories that ache, drift, burn, and vanish—strange echoes from the crypt beneath the canon.

Let us listen.

Works Cited

Beckford, William. Vathek. 1786. Edited by Roger Lonsdale, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford UP, 2009.

Bleiler, Everett F. The Checklist of Fantastic Literature. Shasta Publishers, 1948.

Brown, Charles Brockden. Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist. 1798. Edited by Jay Fliegelman, Penguin Classics, Penguin, 1991.

Gilchrist, R. Murray. The Stone Dragon and Other Tragic Romances. Edited by Mark Valentine, Tartarus Press, 2003.

Hoffmann, E.T.A. Tales of Hoffmann. Various editions; see The Best Tales of Hoffmann, Dover Publications, 1967.

Le Fanu, J. Sheridan. In a Glass Darkly. 1872. Edited by Robert Tracy, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford UP, 1993.
— Carmilla, in In a Glass Darkly.

Lewis, Matthew Gregory. The Monk. 1796. Edited by Howard Anderson, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford UP, 1998.

Lovecraft, H. P. Supernatural Horror in Literature. 1927–35. In Collected Essays: Volume 2, Literary Criticism, edited by S. T. Joshi, Hippocampus Press, 2005.

Machen, Arthur. The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories. Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford UP, 2018.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings. Edited by David Galloway, Penguin Classics, Penguin, 2003.

Potocki, Jan. The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. 1794–1815. Translated by Ian MacLean, Penguin Classics, Penguin, 1995.

Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. 1794. Edited by Bonamy Dobrée, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford UP, 2008.

Reeve, Clara. The Old English Baron. 1777. Edited by James Trainer, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford UP, 2003.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 1818. Edited by Marilyn Butler, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford UP, 2008.

Stenbock, Count Eric. Of Kings and Things: Strange Tales and Decadent Poems. Edited by David Tibet, Strange Attractor Press, 2018.

Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. 1764. Edited by W. S. Lewis, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford UP, 2008.

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