The Old English Baron

Clara Reeve set out to tame the wild supernatural excess of Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and produce a Gothic tale kept within the bounds of probability. Sir Philip Harclay comes home from years of soldiering abroad to find his dearest friend, Lord Lovel, long dead and his estate passed into other hands. In the household he meets Edmund, a young man raised as a peasant whose noble bearing and uncanny likeness to the lost lord hint at a buried secret. A haunted apartment, a suppressed crime, and questions of true birth drive the story toward justice. First published in 1778, it became one of the most influential early Gothic novels and a model for the genre that followed. This free PDF and EPUB edition includes the complete text.