#teaboo

Early Gothic — The Castle of Otranto (more inspired by medieval chivalric romances and I think the author even tried to pass it off as one; but in all my research everyone says this was the first gothic novel), The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (I think was still low-key riding Otranto's coattails in addition to taking inspiration from it, not that that's a bad thing), The Castle of Wolfenbach (now we're getting somewhere), The Mysteries of Udolpho (oh Anne Radcliffe we're really in it now, and by it I mean a literary genre that was new in like 1790 CE), Glenarvon (the earliest instance of a "Byronic" character I could find that wasn't literally Lord George Gordon Byron's self-insert), The Monk (of all the gothic novels that stirred up controversy, this one was the most stirred up controversiest), Northanger Abbey (oh Jane Austen we're really in it now), Fantasmagoriana: Geschichten der Toten (translated from German to French by Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès, not really on this list to read but rather to say oh George Gordon Byron we're really in it now), The Vampyre (the second instance of a "Byronic" character that I've heard about) and Frankenstein.

I elected to leave out a lot that was on Jane Austen's characters' reading lists in Northanger Abbey (Necromancer of the Black Forest, Carl Grosse's Horrid Mysteries, The Italian, The Mysterious Warning, Clermont, The Midnight Bell, and Orphan of the Rhine) because Northanger Abbey was already there, and to include some nonfiction such as Richard Hurd's "Letters on Chivalry and Romance" that was Hurd's observations on that genre's development, as well as Idée sur les Romans by Worst Human Being of the Century award-winner Marquis Donatien Alphonse François de Sade.

Midcentury and Victorian/Edwardian era Gothic — I didn't actually know whether to put The Last Man by Mary Shelley in the Early Gothic list or if 1826 can count as "midcentury". As it stands, this list begins with A Priest in 1839 by Jules Verne (written in the mid/late 1840s but not published until...1992? and unfinished), Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo, assorted novels by the Brontë sisters, The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Carmilla, Dracula, Clemence Housman's Werewolf, Frances Hodgson Burnett's sort of cozy gothic kid lit, The Phantom of the Opera and The Picture of Dorian Gray.