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The 10 best gothic novels in the public domain

May 26, 20264 min readbook-picks

Gothic fiction is the literature of what civilisation refuses to look at directly. Its castles, graveyards, and monsters are vehicles for anxieties that polite culture cannot process in daylight -- about sex, class, death, the body, and the tenuous line between sanity and its opposite. These are the ten best gothic novels available free to read right now.

1. Frankenstein -- Mary Shelley (1818)#

The founding text of the modern Gothic and of science fiction simultaneously. Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus is a novel about the consequences of creation without responsibility, the injustice of circumstance, and what happens when a creature more articulate than its creator is abandoned to a hostile world. Start here. For what the creature represents at a symbolic level, the full analysis covers the critical landscape.

2. Dracula -- Bram Stoker (1897)#

Dracula is a masterwork of the epistolary form -- a horror story told entirely through letters, journals, and newspaper clippings. The count's invasion of England encodes anxieties about sexuality, colonialism, modernity, and the body that were saturating the 1890s. For the Victorian reading of what Dracula represents, that full piece is the companion.

3. Wuthering Heights -- Emily Bronte (1847)#

The most unusual of the three Bronte novels: narrated by two unreliable voices, set against Yorkshire moors that function as a moral environment, and built around a love between Heathcliff and Catherine that refuses the conventions of both Gothic horror and Victorian romance. Free on Foxing. For why the narrators cannot be trusted, the unreliable narrator piece is essential.

4. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde -- Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)#

A novella at 86 pages -- readable in a single sitting -- that has generated more cultural progeny than novels ten times its length. The division of Jekyll and Hyde encodes everything Victorian respectability required men to suppress, and demonstrates what happens when the suppressed self is given independent existence. Free on Foxing.

5. The Picture of Dorian Gray -- Oscar Wilde (1890)#

Wilde's only novel is Gothic in its use of the supernatural device but deeply Aesthetic in its concerns: what is the relationship between beauty and morality, between the surface we present and the self we conceal? The portrait's deterioration is the novel's moral accounting system. Free on Foxing. For what the portrait represents, the analysis covers it.

6. The Turn of the Screw -- Henry James (1898)#

James's novella is Gothic horror in its most formally sophisticated form: a governess who may or may not be seeing ghosts, children who may or may not be corrupted, and a narrative frame that makes certainty impossible. Unlike most Gothic fiction, the horror here may be entirely psychological. That ambiguity is the point.

7. Carmilla -- Sheridan Le Fanu (1872)#

The vampire novella that preceded and influenced Dracula, featuring a female vampire and a female victim and a subtext about transgressive desire that Le Fanu leaves close enough to the surface to be legible. Short, atmospheric, and genuinely unsettling. Available free at Project Gutenberg.

8. The Mysteries of Udolpho -- Ann Radcliffe (1794)#

The founding text of the female Gothic. Radcliffe established the conventions -- the ruined castle, the threatened heroine, the villain of aristocratic menace, the supernatural that turns out to have a natural explanation -- that every subsequent Gothic novel has worked with, against, or through. Austen satirised it in Northanger Abbey. Shelley read it. Its influence is everywhere.

9. The Monk -- Matthew Lewis (1796)#

The most transgressive Gothic novel of the 18th century and arguably the most transgressive English novel of the century. Lewis was nineteen when he wrote it. It was published anonymously for reasons that become immediately clear on reading. It contains murder, incest, necrophilia, and a Faustian pact, and it is considerably better written than that summary suggests.

10. Varney the Vampire -- Thomas Preskett Prest (1847)#

A penny dreadful published in serial form -- long, melodramatic, and often incoherent -- but historically significant as one of the first extended vampire narratives in English and a direct influence on Stoker. Read it as archaeology, not as polished fiction.

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