The Castle of Wolfenbach

The Castle of Wolfenbach is a Gothic novel by the English writer Eliza Parsons, first published in two volumes in 1793, at a point when the Gothic was still a young form rather than an established one.

Matilda Weimar flees the advances of her lecherous and incestuous uncle and seeks shelter in the ancient Castle of Wolfenbach, a stronghold with a reputation and no obvious inhabitants. Among its abandoned chambers she begins to uncover the mystery of the missing Countess of Wolfenbach and whatever happened to the household that once lived there. Her uncle tracks her down anyway, and the novel keeps two pressures running at once: the secret the castle is keeping and the relative who intends to have her back.

Parsons published before Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Lewis's The Monk, and her book is one of the seven horrid novels that Isabella Thorpe recommends to Catherine Morland in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, which shows how widely the genre was being read and argued about in the 1790s.