A charming edition English-language edition published in Paris of what is perhaps the most celebrated of all English Gothic novels, this being the earliest recorded continental European printing of the English text; there was an earlier French translation.
“Lewis mentioned having begun a romance in the style of Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764), and a letter written shortly after he arrived in The Hague hints that he had been encouraged to persist in this plan by reading Anne Radcliffe’s novel The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). The Monk nevertheless differs from Radcliffe’s work in its use of German sources, its delight in the unexplained supernatural, sexual transgression, and an aesthetic of horror, as well as its (often misogynistic) burlesque elements” (ODNB).
A fine and attractive copy.
