Young Shelley immersed himself in Gothic fiction, especially in 1809–11. The immediate results were his Gothic romances, Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, and his earliest long verse narrative, The Wandering Jew. As derivative as these were, they show the wide range of his Gothic reading and his initial ways of striving to make the Gothic his own. Despite his regretting these ‘extravagances’, it turns out he never left the Gothic behind. Instead, he enriched the suggestiveness of Gothic symbol-making across his career – from Alastor and his contributions to Mary’s Frankenstein to The Cenci, Prometheus Unbound, and The Triumph of Life – partly by building on the Gothic’s expansion from the 1760s on but also by exploiting the symbolic fundamentals of ‘Gothic Story’ as Horace Walpole defined them in The Castle of Otranto. By reworking Walpole’s interplay between the assumptions of ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ romance, Shelley repeatedly used the Gothic to intimate the tug-of-war between retrogressive and progressive ideologies that simmered in his own thought and in Western culture.

Though numerous Gothic novels appeared in Romantic-era Britain, critics have tended to focus on the works of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory Lewis, largely ignoring the Gothic output of trade publishing houses such as the Minerva Press. Using the work of Eliza Parsons, Francis Lathom and Isabella Kelly, this chapter argues that the division of Romantic-era Gothics into worthwhile ‘originals’ and uninteresting ‘imitations’ misses the complex intertextuality that characterised Gothic fiction at this formative moment. First,the chapter challenges scholarship’s traditional ‘trickle-down’ model of influence by considering Parsons’s The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) alongside Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790): their shared plotline not only defies expectation by demonstrating Parsons’s independence, but raises the possibility that Radcliffe was responding to the lesser-known fictions published in her day. Second, it questions the sufficiency of the term ‘imitation’ by looking at the creative and subversive uses to which Kelly’s Eva (1799) and Lathom’s The Midnight Bell (1798) put the figure of the Bleeding Nun, an element from Lewis’s The Monk (1796).