The Tale of Terror

The first serious study of the Gothic: Walpole, Radcliffe, Lewis, Maturin and Mary Shelley traced from the Castle of Otranto to the Brontës, with the Minerva Press hacks given their due. Edith Birkhead lectured at Bristol and published this in 1921, when the whole genre was considered beneath notice — every academic history of horror since stands on it. Fifty-nine plates, from Piero della Francesca to Odilon Redon, gather castles, witches, moonlight and ruined abbeys — the visual Gothic that haunted the novels.