The Monk: A Romance

Lewis’s The Monk significantly influenced the development of the Gothic novel in English. The genre first emerged in the late 18th century with Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1765) and Ann Radcliffe’s novels published in the 1780s and 1790s, such as The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). These novels draw on popular European folklore in depicting eerie castles and crumbling ancestral mansions. Often portrayed as the decaying ruins of a pre-Enlightenment age, these settings conjure an appropriately terrifying atmosphere for tales of family curses, murderous secrets, and scheming aristocrats. Radcliffe’s novels typically feature innocent heroines imprisoned in castle towers or dungeons, struggling to free themselves from villainous captors.

Lewis draws heavily on folklore, ghost stories, and ballads to create a chilling atmosphere for his characters’ adventures. He also clearly builds on the work of Radcliffe in The Monk; Lewis’s heroines contend with similar threats of imprisonment and sexual violence. However, The Monk also contains new elements that shaped the development of the Gothic novel. In Radcliffe’s work, the supernatural threats posed by ghosts, demons, and sorcery are always revealed to be fictitious; a Radcliffe heroine ultimately discovers that the ghostly terrors exist only within her imagination.