Tracing the evolution of Brontëan Gothic into sensation fiction between the late 1840s and mid-1860s, this chapter explores the dialogue between Victorian Gothic novels with a domestic setting and contemporary debates about gender known as the Woman Question. Representing the home as the site of violence, infidelity and dysfunction rather than as the tranquil refuge envisioned by domestic ideology, the fiction examined here is informed by, and even explicitly alludes to, topical controversies regarding marriage and gender roles sparked by such events as Caroline Norton’s campaign to reform child custody law, the passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act and the establishment of the civil divorce court. Yet, while their representation of women’s domestic entrapment has feminist undertones, these ideologically conflicted works also echo anxieties about the breakdown of separate spheres reminiscent of the period’s conservative discourses. These anxieties are most evident in the portrayal of the sexually deviant woman, a highly controversial figure in Victorian culture, and one depicted in these examples of domestic Gothic with pronounced, and often aesthetically complex, ambivalence.

This chapter focuses on an often overlooked aspect of the history of Gothic writing: the important works that appeared between the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764–5 and that of Ann Radcliffe’s The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne in 1789. These decades saw the publication of a rich and diverse range of Gothic-marked texts. Novels by Sophia Lee, Clara Reeve, Charlotte Smith and James White are considered in relation to the writing of less well-known authors such as Anne Fuller, Martha Harley, Harriet Meziere, Mr Nicholson and Thomas Sedgwick Whalley, as well as anonymously published work. While acknowledging the variety of approaches, styles and attitudes encompassed by such writing, the chapter demonstrates that, in the 1770s and 1780s, the Gothic is overwhelmingly associated with domestic, British settings. Such domestic Gothic writing also parallels the home and the nation, so that the stories of individuals reflect on national character. This first wave of Gothic texts aims to supplement and interrogate non-imaginative approaches to the nation’s past, participating in a sustained re-examination of British history and identity.