Eliza Parsons 
The Castle of Wolfenbach 

The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) is the most famous novel written by the English Gothic novelist Eliza Parsons. First published in two volumes during 1793, it was one of the seven ‘horrid novels’ recommended by the character Isabella Thorpe to Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey and was an important early work in the genre, predating both Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and Monk Lewis’s The Monk. Matilda Weimar and her servant Albert arrive at a cottage inhabited by two peasants, Pierre and his wife Jaqueline. Matilda is ill for unknown reasons and there is no bed for her to rest in, so they go to the neighbouring haunted Castle of Wolfenbach…