Clermont (novel) "Midnight Bell", "Orphan of the Rhine", and "Horrid Mysteries". Those will last us some time. Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid? —"Northanger Abbey", ch. 6 "Clermont", as well as the other "horrid novels", were once thought to be the creations of Jane Austen's imagination, however research in the first half of the 20th century by Michael Sadleir and Montague Summers confirmed that they did actually exist and stimulated renewed interest in the Gothic. Clermont (novel) Clermont is a Gothic novel by Regina Maria Roche. It was first published in 1798 by
Persuasion (novel) the power of books over women; namely were women more susceptible to the power of reading than men, and if so, was reading a benign or malign influence on women? Austen had first taken up this question in "Northanger Abbey" where reading Gothic books has comic effects on Catherine Morland, but also gives a more acute sense of reality and to understand people. Pinch wrote that Austen returned to this theme of the power of books on women in "Persuasion", but in a more mature and probing manner, where as the novel is concerned with "... what it feels like