The Castle of Wolfenbach

In her novel NORTHANGER ABBEY, Jane Austen mentions several Gothic novels by name. By the time the book saw print, these lesser works were already deservedly obscure (as, indeed, almost all disposable popular fiction soon becomes). For years they were assumed to be not simply fiction, but figments from a novel; but enterprising scholars managed to unearth copies of the original "shilling shockers."Eliza Parsons was a prolific and popluar writer at the end of the eighteenth century. Her works are generally forgotten, now, but two of them -- including THE CASTLE OF WOLFENBACH -- were immortalized in that list of seven "Horrid Novels" Jane Austen slipped into NORTHANGER ABBEY.The French Revolution was a taking place while Eliza Parsons was writing "Castle" and there are references to it throughout the book.

About the Author

Eliza Parsons (née Phelp) (1739 - 1811) was an English Gothic novelist, best known for The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) and The Mysterious Warning (1796). These are two of the seven Gothic titles recommended as reading by a character in Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey. Parsons turned to Gothic writing as a genre that was highly popular at the time. Parsons was a deeply religious Protestant, who believed in the good being rewarded and the wicked punished, which shows through in her works. Her first novel, The History of Miss Meredith, appeared in 1790, the year of her husband's death. The better-known The Castle of Wolfenbach followed in 1793, in a period when opinion in England and France was starting to turn away from arranged marriages. The Castle of Wolfenbach portrays this idea, along with belief in a strong patriarchal family and respect for the middle class rather than aristocracy. Other novels of hers include Women as They Are (1797) and The Valley of Saint Gotthard (1799). Parsons shows female Gothic-writing characteristics by having a heroine trick her way into an inheritance while pretending to be vulnerable and innocent.

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