If the Minerva Press is the publisher most strongly associated with fictional excess, then the gothic is surely excess’s most representative genre. Readers decried the great length of these novels, their numerousness, their unoriginality, and the over-the-top emotions they depicted. This chapter tracks the phenomenon of ‘imitation’ in the late eighteenth-century heyday of the gothic, first in its role as a convenient denunciation hurled at new gothic novels, and then as a broad and flexible authorial practice that, the chapter argues, allowed gothic novelists to capitalize on their strength in numbers and their dedicated readerships. Minerva Gothic novelists, including Regina Maria Roche and Eliza Parsons, used imitation to define and expand the norms of their genre, and publishers like William Lane used the recognizability of certain genres to creatively advertise their new books, while even highly successful authors like Ann Radcliffe had to grapple with charges of unoriginality.

This chapter offers a contemplation on the symbiotic nature and interdependencies of the later works of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, and their consequent reputations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Beginning with an account of how the critical tradition has tended to conceptualise the Radcliffe/ Lewis relation, the chapter focuses in upon a range of contemporary readerships that chose to read, compare and mention in the same breath the works of both authors, often without drawing any aesthetic differences between them.

Though numerous Gothic novels appeared in Romantic-era Britain, critics have tended to focus on the works of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory Lewis, largely ignoring the Gothic output of trade publishing houses such as the Minerva Press. Using the work of Eliza Parsons, Francis Lathom and Isabella Kelly, this chapter argues that the division of Romantic-era Gothics into worthwhile ‘originals’ and uninteresting ‘imitations’ misses the complex intertextuality that characterised Gothic fiction at this formative moment. First,the chapter challenges scholarship’s traditional ‘trickle-down’ model of influence by considering Parsons’s The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) alongside Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790): their shared plotline not only defies expectation by demonstrating Parsons’s independence, but raises the possibility that Radcliffe was responding to the lesser-known fictions published in her day. Second, it questions the sufficiency of the term ‘imitation’ by looking at the creative and subversive uses to which Kelly’s Eva (1799) and Lathom’s The Midnight Bell (1798) put the figure of the Bleeding Nun, an element from Lewis’s The Monk (1796).