Surrealism’s apparent hostility towards the novel was directed more towards the nineteenth-century realist tradition, whereas the movement was strongly attracted to the Gothic novel through its affinity with Romanticism and the celebration of the imagination. It looked back, too, to the pre-rational era of medievalism, celebrating motifs such as the castle, magic, and the supernatural, often framed within the literary device of the narrative journey of discovery, frequented by unnatural events and as exemplified in the writings of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. This chapter finds its focus in the writings of three women: Ithell Colquhoun’s Goose of Hermogenes (1961), an alchemical-erotic journey of self-discovery; Valentine Penrose’s Erzsébet Báthory: La comtesse sanglante (1962), a poetic reinterpretation of a woman whose bloody career ended with her immurement in her own castle; and the poet Joyce Mansour’s Les gisants satisfaits (1958), a savagely erotic reworking of the trope of the persecuted woman. All three focus on the expression of the experience of the female body, with a particular emphasis upon the sensory in the work of Penrose and Mansour, while Colquhoun’s concern lies ultimately in spiritual development. All three refigure the model of the Gothic in post-war surrealist writing.

The first chapter traces the origins of the London police courts and the introduction of courtroom scenes as a literary and journalistic subject in the later eighteenth century. In the absence of an official police force, an orderly, hierarchical courtroom was necessary to sustain magistrates’ public legitimacy and to justify the considerable expansion of the summary court system. In the reformation of summary justice amidst its widening public portrayals, the courtroom’s legal capacity to punish disorder became indelibly linked to its cultural capacity to define public order and the putative threats to it. The first generation of courtroom reporters and the magistrates working in the early decades of the nineteenth century employed the locale to propose distinct visions of moral and social order in the metropolis. They set many of the precedents that would continue to define the courts and their public portrayals in subsequent decades.