Gothic novels, read free online

The Gothic novel began as an eighteenth-century fashion for ruined castles and persecuted heroines, and became, in the nineteenth, the form in which English fiction thought hardest about fear: of science, of the body, of the past that will not stay buried, of the self that will not stay single. The books on this list are the ones that fixed the shape of that tradition.

Two of them were written by young people in remarkable circumstances — Mary Shelley began Frankenstein at eighteen, in a wet summer on Lake Geneva; Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights at twenty-nine and did not live to see its reputation. Two are late-Victorian inventions of a double life, Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde and Wilde’s Dorian Gray. Stoker’s Dracula is the documentary thriller that turned a folk figure into a modern one.

Each is presented complete in a new Bibliomancer edition: the full text, cleaned and typeset here, free to read in the Reader without an account, and available in print if you want it on a shelf.