The Midnight Bell only to see her kidnapped by bandits. The latter third is set in the quintessentially gothic Cohenburg castle and features tales of ghostly apparitions who turn out to be diabolical Roman Catholic priests, another common gothic trope. The Midnight Bell of the title calls the villainous monks to their dark meeting place. The Midnight Bell The Midnight Bell is a gothic novel by Francis Lathom. It was one of the seven "horrid novels" lampooned by Jane Austen in her novel "Northanger Abbey". Dear creature! How much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we will read
Northanger Abbey the trip to Bath, Mrs. Allen is too incapable of independent thought to properly guide Catherine through social situations. She runs into Mrs. Thorpe, a woman she knew fifteen years before at boarding school, which leads to her and Catherine spending much of their time in Bath with the Thorpes. According to notes written by Austen's sister Cassandra after her death in 1817, the novel was finished by 1798 or 1799. The close resemblance in style to Austen's "juvenilia" of the early 1790s together with several in-jokes that only the Austen family could have appreciated strongly suggests that book was