More Gothic Reading

I think that I might as well use this site to come up with interesting snippets of Gothic Literature. I've just finished reading The Shadow of Ashlydyat again. This is the second novel written my Mrs Henry Wood, who wrote East Lynne, the novel on which--believe it or not--Mrs Doubtfire was based. East Lynne was a terrific sensation when it was first published, because it dealt with domestic transgression--an unfaithful wife, thought to have died in a horrible accident with her love, crawls back to secretly take care of her children in the face of their stepmother. It produced the immortal line 'Dead! And never called me mother!' source of a thousand jokes about bad telephone connections.

ANYWAY... The Shadow of Ashlydyat was the author's own favourite among her novels, and is terrifically gothic. The shadow of the title is the shadow of a bier with two mouners that appears in the grounds of the mansion to suggest doom to the family. What I likde about it was the way in which this completely inexplicable phenomenon was treated just as I think it would be--people try and work it out, and when they can't don't assume it is supernatural, but just that there's some natural explanation they can't see--hence not paying attention to its warning... Great stuff and well worth a read. If you would like to have a look, there is a website with a sample chapter, and the whole text available for download (it's out of copyright) here.