novel of sensibility: a popular 18th-century novelistic genre; novels of sensibility feature protagonists who are highly sensitive and emotional, and whose capacity to feel deeply and sympathize with others is a sign of their moral virtue

Examples: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie (1761) Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768) Henry Mackenzie’s A Man of Feeling (1771)

“We flew into each other’s arms, and after having exchanged vows of mutual friendship for the rest of our lives, instantly unfolded to each other the most inward secrets of our hearts—”

— description of Laura and Sophia’s first meeting in Austen’s Love and Friendship (1790)

Gothic novel: a popular type of novel that emerged in Britain in the late 18th century. Horror and terror are the predominant themes and the supernatural plays an important role. As their name suggests, early Gothic novels are often set in the Middle Ages. Typical settings include the remote and foreboding castle and dilapidated, haunted abbey.

Examples: Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796)

illustration of the spectral giant in Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764)

A RECIPE FOR WRITING A GOTHIC NOVEL (written in 1797)

Take—An old castle, half of it ruinous. A long gallery, with a great many doors, some secret ones.

Three murdered bodies, quite fresh.As many skeletons, in chests and presses.An old woman hanging by the neck; with her throat cut.Assassins and desperadoes, quant. suff.Noises, whispers, and groans, threescore at least.

Mix them together, in the form of three volumes, to be taken at

any of the watering places, before going to bed.

We appeal to any one that is acquainted with the common run of Lane’s novels,—as they existed some twenty or thirty years back,—those scanty intellectual viands of the whole female reading public […]—whether he has not found his brain more ‘betossed’, his memory more puzzled, his sense of when and where more confounded, among the improbable events, the incoherent incidents, the inconsistent characters, or no-characters, of some third-rate love intrigue […]—a more bewildering dreaminess induced upon him, than he has felt wandering over all the fairy grounds of Spenser.

— Charles Lamb’s description in Essays of Elia (1823) of Gothic novels published by Minerva Press

[…] This brief account of the family is intended to supersede the necessity of a long and minute detail from Mrs. Thorpe herself, of her past adventures and sufferings, which might otherwise be expected to occupy the three or four following chapters; in which the worthlessness of lords and attornies might be set forth, and conversations, which had passed twenty years before, be minutely repeated. (Austen 22)

Novels are books “written chiefly to the Young, the Ignorant, and the Idle, to whom they serve as Lectures of Conduct, and Introductions into Life. They are the Entertainment of Minds unfurnished with Ideas, and therefore easily susceptible of Impressions; not fixed by Principles, and therefore easily following the Current of Fancy; not informed by Experience, and consequently open to every false Suggestion and partial Account.”

—Samuel Johnson, Rambler, Number 4 (1750)

Pictorial satire on female readers of Gothic by James Gillray (1802)