He wanted to move beyond the realist nature of novels of his day, exemplified by the writings of Tobias Smollett, Henry Fielding, and Samuel Richardson. The most authentic means of getting at the raw root of behavior was to push characters out of the mundane reality of everyday life and into situations of such extraordinary conditions that the true nature of one’s character could no longer be concealed. What Walpole set out to do with his novel was to alter the concept of fiction as an imitation of reality and its stagnation of merely recording how people behaved, instead putting forward a more imaginative exploration of reality by analyzing how people behaved. Much of the most popular fiction at the time Walpole starting composing The Castle of Otranto were those excruciatingly detailed books about manners that painted a portrait of reality that was only accurate on the surface and did not bother trying to penetrate into the psychological imperative behind the commitment to those manners. What he wanted to read were stories that imitated reality in a more authentic way, eschewing the insipid blandness of mere reportage.

Walpole’s major issue with the neoclassical, realist fiction of his time was it had come to seem ridiculously contrived and desperately uninspired. Those conventions belong to the genre that today is referred to as neoclassicism. The stimulus behind Walpole’s invention of a brand-new literary genre was, as is usually the case in these things, a deep and enduring dissatisfaction with conventions popular at the time. I am even persuaded that in the future, when taste will be restored to the place now occupied by philosophy, my poor Castle will find admirers.”

I wrote it in spite of rules, critics, and philosophers it seems to me the better for that. He later explained, “I gave reign to my imagination visions and passions choked me. He then practiced automatic writing and parsed his dreams as he wrote the manuscript over the next two months. Walpole claimed he had a dream one night at his Gothic mansion, Strawberry Hill, which compelled him to write the novel. Most literary experts agree that The Castle of Otranto created the genre of gothic fiction and influenced numerous novels, poems, and other works of art in its own century and beyond. All of these and more might not exist today, had Horace Walpole not published The Castle of Otrantoin 1764.

That Hound of the Baskervilles scaring people out on the moors. Jane Eyre, The Fall of the House of Usher, Rebecca, and The Haunting of Hill House.

The castle of otranto book