Jane Austen's Seven Horrid Novels: A Tale of Literary Sleuthing

“Are they all horrid? Are you sure they are all horrid?”

Here is a story of someone living my dream: tracking down a literary mystery no one else had bothered to solve.

Jane Austen wrote her satirical Gothic novel Northanger Abbey between 1798 and 1799, but it wasn’t published until 1817. It tells the story of young Catherine Morland, the daughter of a country clergyman, who joins her wealthier neighbors for a season in Bath. While there, she meets Isabella Thorpe, who introduces her to Gothic literature. There’s a lot more to the plot, but that’s not what we’re focusing on here.

In Chapter 6, Isabella rattles off a list of seven “horrid” titles — a reading list of Gothic novels for the two friends to enjoy together. For a long time, scholars assumed Austen had invented them as part of the joke: fake “bad books” meant to mock the genre.

However, in 1927, novelist, publisher, and collector Michael Sadleir set out to prove otherwise. He tracked them all down and compiled his findings in The Northanger Novels: A Footnote to Jane Austen. Montague Summers later filled in the remaining details in A Gothic Bibliography (1941). All seven are real books, mostly published between 1793 and 1798 by William Lane’s Minerva Press — the dominant supplier of cheap, sensational fiction to the circulating libraries of the 1790s.

Given Austen’s own reading habits, it’s unlikely this list was meant simply to disparage her fellow novelists. It reads more as an inside joke, even a kind of homage. Her critique is sharper: Catherine is so consumed by fantastical dangers that she fails to recognize the very real ones hiding in plain sight — dressed as respectable English gentlemen.

So what were the books?

The Novels:

Author’s note: These are WILD plots, which makes short summaries difficult. So… I did my best.

1. Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) — Eliza Parsons. An orphaned heroine flees an incestuous uncle to a castle where a countess has been secretly imprisoned for eighteen years. A cross continental chase ensues while morbid details come to light.

2. Clermont (1798) — Regina Maria Roche. A girl raised in seclusion in the Pyrenees joins a Countess for her education. Bandits reveal her father is hiding an old murderous secret. Roche was a best-selling contemporary of Austen’s.

3. The Mysterious Warning (1796) — Eliza Parsons. A disinherited son heeds the warning of a voice beyond the grave and flees his family; a LOT of unfortunate events follow.

4. The Necromancer of the Black Forest (1794) — “Ludwig Flammenberg” (Karl Kahlert), trans. Peter Teuthold. Series of tales including a fake necromancer operating with a bandit gang. An early example of the “rationalised” gothic a.k.a every marvel turns out to be stagecraft.

5. The Midnight Bell (1798) — Francis Lathom. A young man is told his mother has murdered his father; a castle bell tolls every midnight for reasons no one will explain. Often rated the most readable of the seven; the only one not published by Minerva (H. D. Symonds).

6. The Orphan of the Rhine (1798) — Eleanor Sleath. An orphan of noble parentage elopes with an Italian Marchese. In order to avoid a forced marriage orchestrated by her aunt. Only too late, she realizes she picked the wrong man. Openly based on Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho.

7. Horrid Mysteries (1796) — Karl Grosse, trans. Peter Will. A young nobleman is drawn into an Illuminati-style secret society that follows him across Europe faking deaths and staging murders. The most culturally durable of the seven: Percy Shelley loved it, H.P. Lovecraft hated it.