= Fine copy with ample margins. Spine sunfaded; joints rubbed. Lacking French title. Early edition of what is commonly regarded as the true first Gothic novel. It was first published in 1865 (= 1864) and is set in a haunted castle, the novel merged medievalism and terror in a style that has endured ever since. The aesthetic of the book has shaped modern-day gothic books, films, art, music, and the goth subculture.
Walpole was inspired to write the story after a nightmare he had at his Gothic Revival home, Strawberry Hill House in southwest London. The novel initiated a literary genre that would become extremely popular in the later 18th and early 19th century, with authors such as Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, William Thomas Beckford, Matthew Lewis, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson and George DuMaurier.
The Castle of Otranto is the first supernatural English novel and is a singularly influential work of Gothic fiction. It blends elements of realist fiction with the supernatural and fantastical, establishing many of the plot devices and character types that would become typical of the Gothic novel: secret passages, clanging trapdoors, pictures beginning to move, and doors closing by themselves. The poet Thoams Gray told Walpole that the novel made "some of us cry a little, and all in general afraid to go to bed o’nights." (source: Wikipedia).