Word: gothically
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...book trade calls it a Gothic novel. The dust jacket usually shows a terrified young woman running across a lawn, while in the background a ghostly old mansion or château looms menacingly through the fog. Following the chilling tradition of Wuthering Heights and Rebecca, the Gothics thrust innocent and high-minded young women into gloomy households where husbands and lovers are breathlessly suspect, where hidden rooms and violent traditions abound, where hidden doors creak ominously, lights go out mysteriously, and improbable coincidences are just too much for words...
MENFREYA IN THE MORNING by Victoria Holt. 256 pages. Doubleday. $4.50. Britain's Holt is one of the best-known and most successful Gothic storytellers (Mistress of Mellyn, The Legend of the Seventh Virgin). This book is about Harriet Delvaney, a poor little rich girl who is afflicted with a limp and is despised by her father because her mother died at her birth. She marries Bevil Menfrey, the handsome, tawny-haired scion of a high-spirited but impoverished family, and goes to live at Menfreya, a fortresslike mansion on the Cornish coast. Once installed, Harriet is deliriously happy...
Sparks Fly. Amid the cathedral-spired Gothic-solid buildings at Yale University, Art Historian Vincent Scully Jr., 45, excitedly defines the aim of his teaching as putting "the right word together with the visual fact so that all of a sudden sparks fly and a new skill is born: the ability...
...Rather little wool for a very great cry." George Saintsbury's epigram was Ann Radcliffe's epitaph; for more than a century her quaint gothic masterpiece has been buried among bookworms. Yet for half a century before that, from 1794 until the triumph of Dickens and Thackeray, The Mysteries of Udolpho was an international bestseller, acclaimed by Coleridge as "the most interesting novel in the English language." It enchanted Keats, who under its influence wrote The Eve of St. Agnes; it electrified Byron, who stole its hero and called him Childe Harold; it directly inspired Sir Walter Scott...
...painted little, concentrated instead on making an artistic "Center of the World" out of his Hudson River estate. At Olana (thought to be a corruption of the Arabic meaning "our place on high"), Church once again spoke superbly for his age. An eclectic marvel combining elements of Italian villa, Gothic revival, Ruskinian Venetian, French mansard, the mansion stands amid 327 acres of woods and meadow, chock-full of Oriental rugs, Thonet chairs, Tiffany glass and Persian tiles...