Horace Walpole’s "The Castle of Otranto" is the founding novel of the Gothic literary tradition, a work where the supernatural erupts into a world of feudal power and familial tyranny. The story begins with a shocking and inexplicable event: on the day of his wedding to the beautiful Isabella, the sickly Prince Conrad, heir to the Lordship of Otranto, is crushed to death by a gigantic, enchanted helmet that falls from the sky. His father, the ruthless and ambitious Prince Manfred, is determined to prevent the ancient prophecy that foretells the end of his line and the loss of his castle. In a desperate and tyrannical act, he decides to divorce his own wife, Hippolita, and marry the terrified Isabella himself. The narrative follows Isabella’s frantic flight through the castle’s secret passages and subterranean vaults, aided by a virtuous young peasant named Theodore, who bears a mysterious resemblance to the castle’s former true ruler. As Manfred’s schemes grow more frantic and wicked, the castle itself becomes a character, haunted by spectral phenomena: portraits sigh and step from their frames, skeletal hermits offer cryptic warnings, and the pieces of a giant, stone statue assemble themselves. Horace Walpole creates a claustrophobic atmosphere of impending doom, where the sins of a usurping ancestor are visited upon his descendant through ghostly vengeance. The novel is a masterpiece of suspense and the macabre, establishing the core elements of haunted castles, doomed aristocrats, and supernatural justice that would define the Gothic genre for centuries to come.

Table of Contents:

• The Castle of Otranto. Part 1

• The Castle of Otranto. Part 2