You’ll often hear the term “Gothic romance” tossed about, sometimes in wildly different contexts. Are we talking about mid-century pulp novels whose covers feature women in flowing gowns fleeing from brooding men and looming castles? Or are we talking about The Castle of Otranto—a novel which hardly contains anything that modern readers would recognize as romance. To understand the many meanings of a phrase like “Gothic romance,” we have to dive into the history of what the words “romance” and “romantic” have meant in a literary context over the years.
As you might guess if you’re familiar with the linguistic term “Romance languages,” the etymology of the word “romance” is tied to the history of the Roman Empire. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, after the Roman Empire extended to include the region of Gaul in the early centuries of the Common Era, the Gaulish people began speaking a Latin-derived language that they called “Romanus.” By the Middle Ages, the word “romans” was used to refer to the vernacular language, as well as to any works composed in it—which were generally the works of popular literature, in contrast to the formal or religious writings that used Latin. This brings us to the development of the chivalric romance, a literary genre that flourished among the noble courts of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. The chivalric romance, sometimes called heroic romance, was a type of prose or verse narrative characterized by knights-errant going on wondrous adventures and fulfilling quests. They often starred characters from legend, such as King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, or historical figures like Charlemagne and Roland. The stories often involved encounters with fantastical beings like dragons or sorcerers. They also emphasized themes of courtly love, which would eventually contribute to our more modern notions of the word “romance.”
Centuries later, the word “romance” continued to be used to refer to styles of popular literature. As the modern novel began to emerge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these works were called “romances”—as they still are in French and German. “Gothic” and “romance” were first used in proximity to each other in the second edition of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. When the novel was first published in 1764, Walpole initially tried to pass it off as a recently discovered medieval manuscript. But with the second edition in 1765, Walpole gave up the hoax, publishing under his own name and adding the subtitle “A Gothic Story” to the title page. In his preface to the second edition, Walpole wrote that the book “was an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern.” Here, Walpole evokes the multiplicity of meanings that the literary designation of “romance” already encompassed by this time. On the ancient side, you have the melodramatic and fantastical elements of chivalric romance and earlier forms of popular literature. On the modern side, you have the efforts to realistically imitate life in eighteenth-century novels like Robinson Crusoe. Walpole believed that with this “Gothic story” he was creating “a new species of romance” by depicting realistic characters who experience wondrous and supernatural events. Thus the works of Walpole and his successors were often referred to as “Gothic,” “romances,” or “Gothic romances.” Indeed, you’ll often see the word “romance” crop up in the titles of early Gothic novels, such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest and A Sicilian Romance.
If all those meanings of “romance” weren’t confusing enough, the early days of the Gothic novel also coincided with the rise of the Romantic Movement. Romanticism was an artistic and philosophical movement that swept Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. Its proponents rebelled against the cold rationality of the Enlightenment by embracing strong emotions, mystery, and the supernatural. The philosophy also emphasized the internal mind of the individual, the beauty of nature, and a glorification of the past, especially the medieval era. Many writers during this period incorporated elements of Romantic philosophy into their works. Some of the writers themselves even ended up becoming literary tropes! Lord Byron, one of the most controversial leaders of the movement, became the model for “Byronic” characters such as the dangerously seductive Lord Ruthven in John Polidori’s “The Vampyre.”
The mid-nineteenth century brought us the Brontë sisters, who were instrumental in linking the Gothic mode of literature with plots centered on romantic love. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights explores the equally passionate and toxic love between Catherine and Heathcliff. But it was Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre that really set the mold for Gothic romances to come. The plot of Jane Eyre centers on the romantic relationship between the young protagonist, Jane, and her brooding and mysterious employer, Mr. Rochester. The relationship dynamics of Jane Eyre served as a template for works a century later, including Du Maurier’s Rebecca in 1938 and many of the mid-century pulp novels that became known as “gothics” or “gothic romances.” These cheaply printed paperbacks with lurid covers often starred love interests with a dark secret like Mr. Rochester and explored Gothic themes such as the dangers of marriage or imprisonment and isolation in the domestic space. Popular authors from this era included Victoria Holt, Phyllis A. Whitney, and Dorothy Eden.
Meanwhile, the modern romance novel was taking on a life of its own in the twentieth century, beyond just the examples discussed above. One seminal figure in the development of this genre was Georgette Heyer, an extremely prolific British novelist who published dozens of books from the 1920s through the 1970s. Heyer drew inspiration from Jane Austen and often set her novels in the same time period as Austen’s, thus popularizing the Regency romance and historical romance genre more broadly. Heyer also sometimes blended the Austenesque with the Gothic (as Austen herself did in Northanger Abbey) in books like The Black Moth and The Quiet Gentleman. Dedicated romance publishers like Harlequin and Mills & Boon helped to carve out a market for the romance genre and allow it to expand into numerous categories and subgenres. Historical romance continued to dominate the scene, with authors borrowing as much from the Brontës as from Austen and Heyer. A later subgenre, paranormal romance, also turned to the Gothic for inspiration—borrowing supernatural creatures that had formerly been relegated to horror and taking the Romantic-era tendency to view monsters in a sympathetic light to new heights by turning them into love interests. Even romances with no historical or supernatural elements can still show the influence of the Gothic, particularly in tropes like brooding, Byronic heroes; naive and vulnerable heroines; or the revelation of dark family secrets.
These days, when you hear the word “romance” you probably most often think of the type of romantic and sexual relationships that serve as the focus of the modern romance novel. Yet, the word still carries associations with the dreamy philosophies of the eighteenth century and the loyal knights of medieval poetry. And the word “romance” has remained tied together with the Gothic in multiple different ways throughout its centuries of history. If you like these educational posts, check out the other entries I’ve made in this series on Gothic Vocab. And please let me know in the comments below what other words you would like to see me cover!