Thread by @PulpLibrarian

Time for our occasional series 'Women with great hair fleeing gothic houses!' And today I present a brief history of the rise and fall and rise again of the gothic romance novel...

New readers start here: what is a gothic romance? Well it's a romance story with strong supernatural themes, all tied to an atmospheric and foreboding building which our heroine must flee.

Actually it's a lot more complex than that...

Firstly it has a long pedigree. Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) is usually acknowledged as the first gothic romance; set during the Crusades it follows Lord Manfred's fateful decision to divorce his wife and pursue his dead son's bride-to-be Isabella.

Isabella of course flees the castle, and her father arrives seeking retribution. But what sets this up as a gothic romance is the atmosphere Walpole creates: stormy moonless nights, ghostly apparitions, statues that drip blood, all set against the background of a sinister castle.

Otranto was a huge success, and was followed by many more gothic tales of love. Ann Radcliffe published The Mysteries of Udolpho in 1794; fair Emily is trapped in a castle of ghosts, legends and secret passageways as she tries to flee Lord Udolpho.

Matthew Lewis's 1796 novel The Monk took the gothic supernatural to new heights; demonic powers, witchcraft, a Bleeding Nun and the Spanish Inquisition all feature in this tale of the lust-demented monk Ambrosio.

You weren't expecting the Spanish Inquisition were you...

By the 1800s the gothic romance had begun to develop along two distinct paths. One was forged by the Brontë family...

Wuthering Heights, published in 1847 is an ur-text of the gothic romance genre. Emily Brontë's novel of cruelty and passion amongst two generations of two families, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, all living in the shadow of the doomed love between Catherine and Heathcliffe.

Jane Eyre, published the same year by Charlotte Brontë, is a harrowing story of a heroine treated cruelly by almost everyone she meets, including Edward Rochester - the man she finally marries after he is humbled and almost destroyed by his first wife.

Many of the Brontë themes recur in subsequent gothic romances: the Byrinic anti-hero, the governess who finds love, the cruel household, the relative who is locked away, the unhappy marriage. But the gothic themes are now of their time - no medieval castles any more.

The second gothic branch emerged earlier, and seemed poised to be the more successful. Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus, was published by Mary Shelly in 1818. It may be the first science fiction novel, but it was instrumental in redefining the gothic...

Frankenstein is a story of great ambition, terror and pity. It is a love story as well as a revenge tragedy. But it's major accomplishment was to plant the gothic into the soil of scientific rationality: the horrors that man create can outstrip the terrors of the supernatural.

Throughout the 19th century psychological and scientific gothic horror began to make its mark: mad creations of man, crazed séances and mesmeric powers lurked in forbidding houses...

Whilst the supernatural gothic turned towards vampires and etheric creatures. Gothic mystery and suspense were in, women with great hair fleeing houses was out.

But in 1938 all that changed: the gothic received a hefty jolt of life when Daphne du Maurier published her novel Rebecca, an instant publishing success that sold 3 million copies.

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” The manipulative first Mrs de Winter haunts the novel and the house, threatens the sanity and the life of the second Mrs de Winter and finally reaches out from her watery grave to destroy the soul of her husband.

I don't think it's coincidence that Rebecca was a success at around the same time that another pulp genre - the noir thriller - was beginning its ascendancy. Both genres deal with the cruelty of doomed love and how it destroys people; driving them to crime, insanity or death.

Noir, like the gothic, has its own tropes and character arcs, but both have characters trapped and often doomed in forbidding circumstances. Alfred Hitchcock would direct the film versions of both Rebecca and Jamaica Inn, before filming Spellbound and Rope.

Gaslight, a 1938 play written by Patrick Hamilton and later made into a film, also effortlessly blended the Noir and the modern gothic together. It also provided one of the classic motifs of the genre - a woman manipulated into madness by a cruel lover.

Then in 1960 Mistress of Mellyn, by unknown author Victoria Holt, became an overnight publishing success. The story echoed both on Rebecca and Jane Eyre: a governess takes a job in a foreboding Cornish mansion which is haunted by the dead wife of her mysterious employer.

Many believed du Maurier had written the book herself. Actually Mistress of Mellyn was penned by prolific British author Eleanor Hibbert. Her agent had convinced her to revive the gothic romance genre, believing there was still a market for this type of popular literature.

Soon Holt, along with Dorothy Eden, Joan Aiken, Marilyn Ross and a host of other authors were leading a gothic revival that would run through to the mid-80s. It was also a revival sold by word of mouth recommendation, which helps explain why the cover art was so similar.

Several hundred different gothic romances were published during these boom years, and though the stories were different the underlying theme remained the same: passion is as cruel as it is kind; endurance is not enough, you must fight in order to win.

Will the gothic romance make a comeback? It's a remarkably robust and flexible genre that's capable if great depth - both emotionally and psychologically. I'm sure its time will come again.

But for now let's relax: there's surely nothing to fear in your house. Except that strange laughter from the attic, each dark and moonless night as the wind sends shadows through your haunted dreams...

Mind how you flee.