Gothic Auntie

Literature, folklore, and history

recent posts

  • Tea Pairings for Gothic Novels; the Vampire Classics

    A little while ago it occurred to me it might be fun to create tea pairings for gothic novels. A cup of tea and a book are classic combination, but what if you carefully selected your tea to match the aesthetic and vibes of whatever you were reading? Think of me as your tea sommelier, helping you create an even more immersive experience.

    “Dracula” by Bram Stoker

    Not the original, but in many ways the most significant gothic vampire story, Dracula tells of the Count’s attempt to relocate to London, and the people he ate along the way – before his defeat at the hands of a co-dependent group of himbos and the woman who holds all of their brain cells.

    For this I recommend Russian Caravan, a blend of different black teas that tastes like it’s been smoked over a campfire. It hasn’t, but it does contain lapsang souchong which is dried over a pine wood fire during processing, and that flavour is brought out by the addition of the other tea varieties. Traditionally Russian Caravan is drunk unsweetened, with the addition of milk a matter of individual choice.

    Alternatively you could pair it with a cup of English breakfast tea, milk, no sugar, in recognition of the Count’s desire to become a proper Englishman.

    “Carmilla” by Sheridan Le Fanu

    The original Sapphic vampire novel, Carmilla is the story of a an ancient vampire noblewoman who preys exclusively on young women, sometimes falling in love with them even as she drains them of their blood and lifeforce over time. To accompany her I recommend a black tea with almonds in it, with perhaps a touch of milk to soften the edges. A refined, delicately scented choice with just a hint of cyanide underneath the sweetness.

    “The Vampyre” by Dr. Polidori

    Poor Polidori. Basically a tale about how Byron was a soul draining monster who ruined lives everywhere he went with his seemingly preternatural powers of seduction. It says a lot that the two staples of the modern horror genre were created in direct response to spending a summer trapped indoors with Lord Byron, but I digress. For The Vampyre I recommend an Assam with cinnamon; strong flavoured, stimulating, and seductive. Drink it black to bring out the note of bitterness underneath.

    While the links I’ve included above are bookshop.org affiliate links for print copies of the novels, because these are all out of print classics they are also available to read online for free and can be accessed at the following links;

    Dracula

    Carmilla

    The Vampyre

    Dracula

  • Where to Start With Classic Gothic Novels

    Where to Start With Classic Gothic Novels

    Gothic literature has a timeless appeal. As long as people are horrible to each other in grand, sweeping ways, as long as there are unbalanced power dynamics and people willing to exploit them, as long as people decide to psychologically torture each other instead of going to therapy, gothic literature will be there — offering catharsis, or at least, to make the horrors sexy. 

    Maybe you find yourself with a sudden need for that catharsis. Maybe you’ve recently encountered the gothic and it’s ignited something feral and greedy inside you. Maybe you’re already a fan of more recent gothic works and looking for a deeper understanding of the genre as a whole. Whatever brought you here, one of these novels will be the right one to start your descent into gothic literature’s early depths — and I’ve included links on where to read them for free at the bottom of the post.

    “The Castle of Otranto” by Horace Walpole

    The original gothic novel, if you want to understand the origins of the genre then The Castle of Otranto is the place to start. It does have the benefit of being a pretty fast read, however…

    It’s also an objectively bad novel. The pacing is erratic, the plot is full of holes, and its genuinely hard to believe Walpole had ever so much as spoken to a woman in his life just going off the way he wrote his female characters. Its still worth reading because of its impact on later work, and so you can understand the references other author’s both in and outside of the genre make to it, but its a disaster of a book. On the other hand it’s a fairly entertaining disaster, in the deliberately watching a bad movie sort of way; especially if you make it a group activity and take it in turns to read it out loud with a group of equally unfamiliar friends.

    “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Bronte

    Often recommended to teenagers, Jane Eyre is one of the most accessible of the early gothic novels, so if you tend to struggle with the prose in older works she’s a great entry point to the genre. One of the most influential of the gothic romances, Jane Eyre established the figure of the governess as an archetypal gothic heroine. Filled with familiar gothic tropes like the brooding hero, mist filled countryside, and looming, isolated mansions, the story manages to be surprising (at least, if you haven’t had it spoilered for you) and is a pretty enjoyable read.

    “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Bronte

    Wuthering Heights genuinely has something for everyone. There’s romance, tragedy, horror, analysis of oppressive social structures, drama, and the gloriously gloomy scenery of the moors standing behind it all. No-one in this book is remotely likeable, so if you’re someone who needs a relatable protagonist, or at least one you don’t want to strangle, this probably isn’t the place to start. However, if you’re someone who lives for the drama, and watching two people commit to making each other worse is your idea of a good time, then this is the one for you. 

    Be warned though; animal cruelty and domestic violence feature, so if those are topics you don’t want to engage with you might want to avoid.

    “The Phantom of the Opera” by Gaston LeRoux

    This might be a great entry point for fans of the musical. I say might because in my experience there’s a fifty fifty chance they’ll absolutely love or utterly hate the book, and the same goes for book fans encountering the musical for the first time. Still, it’s got the lush, romantic aesthetics and grimy reality of the Parisian opera, intense psychological horror, and a truly terrifying villain. The overall vibes are histrionic, in an entirely enjoyable way, and the plot has twists you won’t see coming even if you are intimately familiar with the musical. The Phantom of the Opera is a great gothic starting point for readers who generally lean towards horror, enjoy social history, or fantasise about being a 18th century artistic type in France. 

    “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley

    If you’re someone who enjoys science-fiction, existential questions about the nature of humanity, and monster as metaphor for man’s own monstrosity, then Mary Shelley’s genre spanning opus is for you. A novel that leans hard toward the horror and away from the romance in gothic fiction, I didn’t find Frankenstein frightening when I read it, just incredibly, incredibly sad. It’s definitely horrifying, but not in the jump scare sleeping with the lights on way, at least in my experience. It may make you sit with uncomfortable philosophical questions in the middle of the night, which is it’s own sort of horror I suppose.

    The above links are bookshop.org affiliate links, so if you purchase through them you’ll be helping me and my favourite small local bookshop. Because these novels are all out of copyright however they can also be read easily online for free at the links below;

    The Castle of Otranto

    Jane Eyre

    Wuthering Heights

    The Phantom of the Opera

    Frankenstein

  • Is Jane Eyre a Dark Romance?

    I can feel the lit snobs bristling from here, but it’s true; Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and a lot of gothic classics all fit the brief for dark romance. What’s more, the moral panic that dark romance has inspired is the exact same one that played out over gothic literature in the 18th and 19th centuries.

    The belief that women will be corrupted by reading scary, sexy things, that they can’t tell fiction from reality or know their own minds is an old and frustrating one. The fact that many of those hand wringing now will gush about the Brontë’s novels, because they’re part of the literary canon and therefore above reproach, just adds a level of sad irony to it all. Someone is incapable of reading critically here, and for the most part it’s not the ladies devouring mafia romances.

    Alright, sure, some of you are probably saying, I can see how Wuthering Heights fits the bill. The whole point is that Heathcliff and Cathy’s love is so toxic it ruins lives for multiple generations, and Heathcliff is so creatively horrible that he’d probably scare Byron himself, at least a little bit. A lot of early gothic novels have the hallmarks of dark romance to them, but Jane Eyre? To which I say, especially Jane Eyre.

    The thing about Jane Eyre is that Jane herself tricks you into thinking everything going on is a lot more reasonable than actually it is. She’s got such a practical, pragmatic voice that you end up forgetting you’re even in a gothic novel at times, and nodding along when she tells you the ending is a happily domestic one. But let’s look at Rochester. The man imprisons his wife in the attic and pretends she doesn’t exist in order to trick a vulnerable woman with no support structure or financial resources into believing that she’s marrying him. This is classic dark romance behaviour.

    Impersonating a fortune teller to try and convince her that he’s the one for her? Setting up a fake wedding and somehow persuading a priest to go along with it? Literally imprisoning his previous partner in an attic? Rochester is a dark romance love interest. He’s a sexy villain willing to do anything to acquire the woman he loves, no matter the harm it causes her, or anyone else. He lets her go when she discovers his secret, but then he’s already got one captive wife who hates him, he doesn’t want another. He wanted Jane to continue being her sweet, domestic self, adoring him and grateful for his elevating her to the status of wealthy wife, or mistress — adding another Fury to the attic would defeat the purpose. Though I’ll admit that his choosing not to do that does take away, at least a little, from the dark romance element — I’m not sure Heathcliff would have cared.

    Jane is convinced he’s reformed at the end but then, has he? Or is he just no longer capable of enacting all the villainy he wants thanks to his injuries from the fire? Yes, he got them risking his life to try and save Bertha — or so he tells Jane at least, we’ve only got his word for that after all — but having qualms about letting your prisoner burn to death does not signify a total personality change. It just means that there are limits to his depravity, and trying to keep the woman you’ve held captive in your attic from burning to death is a low bar, even if she did set the fire herself. Jane thinks he’s changed, but in reality he’s just dependent on her thanks to his injuries, he’s still the same deceptive, possessive man with a cruel streak we met right at the beginning. And with his eyesight returning at the end of the novel it’s entirely possible he’s going to return to his old ways soon after the final chapter closes.

    Jane Eyre can be read for free here, but if you want to purchase your own copy then you can support me and a small independent bookshop through this affiliate link.

  • Did Early Exposure to Gothic Literature Make Me a Spooky Little Nerd?

    Did you ever read any of the gothic classics when you were too young to really appreciate them? I have no idea if either of these books were formative in any way, as all I really remember about either is intensely disliking the experience of reading them; its possible my later adoration of everything gothic developed independently (thanks largely to the Sisters of Mercy, and, later, Byron), but I suppose it’s equally possible they slithered down into my developing psyche, laying gothic snares for tween and teen me to stumble into.

    The first gothic novel I ever read was The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I did not enjoy the experience, which I think everyone could have predicted given I was about seven, but I was also stubborn enough I was determined to get all the way through it anyway. I distinctly remember my grandmother saying “Are you sure?” and trying to gently inform me it would be nothing whatsoever like the (I think Disney?) cartoon riffing on it that we’d just watched and which had inspired me to ask, but again, seven year old me was stubborn. (This was also how I ended up reading Animal Farm the next year, which definitely was a formative experience for little me). I genuinely remember nothing of the actual contents of the novel, just an all pervading sense of darkness and my own deep frustration — which I think may actually be an appropriate response to it after all. I do have a very clear memory of the cover, and reading it aloud in the back seat of my grandparents car though. I think I should probably try reading it again now that I’ve typed all this out, but I’ll have to get through my inner seven year old’s protests first.

    The next one was Frankenstein. I was eleven and had just watched a film adaptation with my grandmother. Once again we did the are you sure dance but she supported my reading development and got me a copy anyway. Once again I did not enjoy myself, though I suspect my dislike of the experience was because I actually got the point of the novel (instead of just being a small child) this time, and wasn’t quite ready for that level of anger and misery in my reading matter. I liked fantasy novels a lot at that age and wanted there to be a nice, straightforward, happy ending. Given the movie we’d just watched had been a pretty faithful adaptation, at least to the spirit of the novel, and I’d found it thoroughly depressing I don’t know what I was expecting. Probably something more fun, in line with my parents Hammer Horror collection, but in fairness, my grandmother did tell me it wouldn’t be.

    Which leads me into an embarrassing confession. At time of writing I still haven’t finished reading Dracula. Have you ever absorbed so much information about a book or a film that you just kind of forget you haven’t actually read or watched it? Yes, that was me and Dracula. In fairness to myself my Dad has a thing about Dracula film adaptations and one of my best friends has a deep and powerful obsession with the book, so I think I just spent so much time listening to the two of them talk about it that it just started to feel like I’d read it too. Then last year I realised I actually hadn’t. My wife and I are planning to read it out loud together, which is why I still haven’t read it yet, because we have a tbr pile to get through first. Still I’m considering shuffling the pile so it comes out near the top.

    Are there gothic novels you read when you were way too young to appreciate them (or possibly came away scarred from the experience)? What about books you passively absorbed so much about you forgot you hadn’t read them yourself? I’d genuinely love to know. (I can’t be the only one).