SOURCE: "Historical Gothic," in The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel, Fortune Press, 1938.

In this excerpt, Summers describes the importance of Walpole's extravagant residence, Strawberry Hill, to understanding The Castle of Otranto and briefly surveys the critical reaction to the novel.

To The Castle of Otranto "we owe nothing less than a revolution in public taste, and its influence is strong even at the present day. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that to Walpole's romance is due the ghost story and the novel, containing so much of the supernatural and occult, than which no forms of literature are now [1923] more common and applauded. The Castle of Otranto is, in fine, a notable landmark in the history of English taste and English literature."⁵¹ This is high praise, but I bate no jot of it, yet when I wrote more than a decade ago I chose...