SOURCE: "The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, in A Reader's Guide to Fifty British Novels, 1600 1900, Heinemann, 1979.

In the following excerpt, Phelps considers the historical importance of The Castle of Otranto.

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The events which the story narrates are supposed to have occurred sometime in the twelfth or the thirteenth century, and although there is a real Otranto (on the Strait of Otranto, in southern Italy) the location is essentially dreamlike, while the names of Manfred, the Prince of Otranto in the story, and of Conrad, his ailing son, sound more German than Italian.

The story opens as Manfred is making hasty preparations for the marriage of Conrad to Isabella, daughter of the Marquis of Vicenza, whom he has secured in the castle with the connivance of her guardians and during the absence of her father. Manfred's servants attribute the haste to his dread of an...