The Castle of Otranto

The Castle of Otranto is a novel by Horace Walpole, first published in 1764 and generally regarded as the first Gothic novel. It was issued pseudonymously as a translation of an Italian story, and in the second edition Walpole applied the word Gothic to it in the subtitle.

The plot begins as Manfred, the lord of Otranto, is arranging the marriage of his son, who is killed by an enormous helmet that falls into the courtyard. Manfred decides to divorce his wife and marry the intended bride himself in order to keep the castle in his family, and the castle answers with portents, a giant, a ghost and the gradual arrival of the person the estate actually belongs to.

Walpole wrote the book quickly and set it in a medieval past he was inventing as much as recalling, and it became the model for the haunted-castle fiction that followed. It is still read as the starting point of the Gothic tradition in English and as a story whose supernatural machinery arrived fully formed.