What ever happened to Gothic Romances?

[Extollager]

Uncle Silas is moving right along, with plenty of atmosphere and some amusing characters.

 

[Randy M.]

A few years ago I re/read a handful of Le Fanu's short stories and was surprised at how quickly that 19th century prose trotted along. That's not true of all 19th century writers.

Randy M.

 

[Extollager]

I'm really enjoying Uncle Silas, which generates suspense and amusement skillfully. I would say, to prospective readers -- have some patience with Maud Ruthyn. She is a developing character, and she doesn't start out with a lot of knowledge of human duplicity. But we see her developing as she deals with the conflicts she encounters.

 

[Extollager]

I'm about 3/4 through Uncle Silas & continue to enjoy reading it, but I wanted to caution prospective readers who might expect a full array of Gothic alarms -- supposed ghosts, bloodstains, ghastly whispers and shrieks, forbidden rooms, ivy-clad monastic ruins, what have you. The novel forgoes a lot of that kind of thing. Maud is in effect a captive because she is naive, is not of age, is female, is of gentle social class, feels bound by her dead father's will to submit to the guardianship of his sinister, drug-addicted brother Silas, &c. There's almost an element of "gaslighting."

It's often said to have a strong element of Swedenborgianism. Swedenborg is mentioned, but I don't know that I would say that the element seems all that strong, though I still have a sizeable chunk of the book to go. I'm just past the point where Silas's son has made his awkward marriage proposal.

 

[Extollager]

With about 20 pages to go, I pause to write that a trick played on Maud in Uncle Silas reminded me of the Patrick McGoohan Prisoner series -- which gave me a "duhhh!" moment: what a Gothic series that was, though I don't recall thinking of that before. But what a clever adaptation, as it were, of the Gothic prisoner idea with that of sci-fi espionage. No wonder I liked it so much.

Which consider!

 

[J Riff]

Uncle Silas is a very good read* )

 

[Extollager]

Yes. Just finished it, during a thunderstorm, suitably enough. Very agreeable!

(Just an image I found online.)

 

[Toby Frost]

Here is an interesting twitter thread on the subgenre:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1263818991765725184

 

[Brian G Turner]

That's a superb thread, Toby.

 

[Toby Frost]

Thanks Brian. Pulp Librarian is usually pretty good.

 

[Don]

Wruter: You make a good point. In the very old days, a "gothic romance" would be the kind of novel you're talking about (just as the novels of H. G. Wells were "scientific romances.")

The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction credits Scientific Romances collected by C H Hinton, 1886 with giving Wells the idea of time as a "fourth dimension."

The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

Cambridge Core - American Literature - The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

www.cambridge.org

 

[Night_Eternal]

I love this thread because even though I'm a beer drinkin' muscle havin' man, I have always loved those covers. Used to have fun looking at them when I was going to Goodwill to get cheapo books back in the day. Never bought any, though, since I doubt they were my thing story wise. I'm just a sucker for Gothic imagery.

This was what my first copy of We Have Always Lived in the Castle looked like. While it's not a Gothic romance novel, I always sorta thought the cover was evocative of that same kind of atmosphere, even if it was missing the mansion/castle. Sadly it fell apart years ago.

 

[ArmyBrat09165]

Well, Ican't find the cover of The Bat that I once had... most versions feature an actual bat on the cover, but this one shows us the typical gothic setting, as seen in bat-vision.
View attachment 39577

I love gothic romances. I have been collecting since the late 70s. I have hundreds of them. They are getting hard to find now. Got a bunch at a thrift store the other day.

 

[ArmyBrat09165]

Way back in the 1960's and 1970's there were a bunch of paperback Romance novels of the Gothic subcategory. These descendents of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (just as the still popular Regency Romances are the descendents of Jane Austen) were so popular that their covers became stereotyped. A young woman running away from a spooky mansion, which usually had one window lit.

A lot more here:

Loads Of Women Running From Houses: The Gothic Romance Paperback |

There was even a comic book version for a few years in the 1970's:

My question:

What happened to this very popular subgenre? Did modern horror/vampire romances/urban fantasy take its place?

Dorothy Daniels is one of my favorite authors. I have quite a few of her books.

 

[Extollager]

I love gothic romances. I have been collecting since the late 70s. I have hundreds of them. They are getting hard to find now. Got a bunch at a thrift store the other day.

We'd welcome a list from you of, say, five particularly good ones.

 

[dask]

Back in the sixties the used bookstore where I got most of my sf when I started collecting had a good sized area directly across from the science fiction devoted to just gothic romances. Now it seems you can't find them anywhere unless by accident.

 

[Extollager]

A while ago I invented a pseudonym I like very much for a Gothic romance writer: she would publish as Linden Lea Hawthorne. Here's a painting for one of her books. Now we just need a title and a text.

 

[dask]

I’ll read it.

 

[Randy M.]

Great name, Extollager.

 

[Toby Frost]

The House Of High Windows?
A Light on the Moors?
Destiny In Mauve?

Mary Stewart seems to have produced a few novels of this sort: Why You Should be Reading Mary Stewart, the Mid-Century Queen of Romantic Suspense