The Gothic revival . . . appeared in English gardens and architecture before it got into literature . . . . When the Gothic made its appearance in literature, Horace Walpole (1717–1797) was . . . a chief initiator, publishing The Castle of Otranto (1764), a short novel in which the ingredients are a haunted castle, a Byronic villain, mysterious deaths, supernatural happenings, a moaning ancestral portrait, a damsel in distress, and, as the Oxford Companion to English Literature puts it, "violent emotions of terror, anguish, and love."
Via Gothic Literature--Overview (Norton Anthology)
frontpiece to Frankenstein (1831)
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