Why did readers turn on the first Gothic novel once they learned who wrote it?

The book that launched an entire genre of haunted castles, ghosts, and crumbling ruins started out as a lie. Horace Walpole's 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, the first work ever labelled "Gothic," was originally published as if it were a genuine translation of a sixteenth-century Italian manuscript. Readers loved it. Then, in the second edition, Walpole admitted he had written the whole thing himself and added the now-famous subtitle A Gothic Story—and the public turned on him, objecting that it was inappropriate for a modern author, living in a rational age, to write a supernatural story at all.

The backlash didn't stop the genre from catching fire. Walpole's novel inspired imitators almost immediately, including Clara Reeve, who described her own 1778 novel in its preface as "the literary offspring of The Castle of Otranto." What held the genre together, beyond castles and ghosts, was a specific emotional aesthetic: an environment of fear, the constant threat of something supernatural, and the sense of the past intruding on the present. That aesthetic had an actual philosophical source—Edmund Burke's 1757 essay on the sublime, which effectively codified the whole emotional experience the Gothic was chasing.

The genre grew so popular, so fast, that even its fans got sick of it. By 1797, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, after months of reviewing new Gothic novels for a living, wrote that he was nearly "weary of the Terrible," complaining that dungeons, old castles, solitary houses, caverns, and extraordinary characters had "crowded" in on him "even to surfeiting." Walter Scott described the opposite extreme of public appetite when Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho came out: in large families, he wrote, the volumes "flew" from reader to reader and "were sometimes torn from hand to hand."

The genre's excesses eventually made it ripe for its own parody, most famously in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, where the naive heroine Catherine imagines herself living inside a Radcliffe novel, suspecting murder and villainy everywhere, only to discover that the truth is far more ordinary. Austen also described the typical reader of these novels as someone who, even while thoroughly enjoying the story, felt she had to "lay down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame".