Demon worship, imprisonment, illicit desire, rape. With such subject matter, it’s little surprise that
Matthew Gregory Lewis’
The Monk became a sensation as soon as it appeared in 1796. England’s reading public found the book so compelling that it went through numerous editions within the first couple years of its publication. Today, Matthew Lewis is widely recognized as a central figure in the history of Gothic fiction. In
The Monk, he uses the novel’s twisting plots and supernatural machinery to expose the dangers of repressed desire, attack religious hypocrisy, and challenge late eighteenth-century definitions of virtue and propriety.
About the author
Matthew Lewis was born in London on July 9, 1775. The family’s wealth and social connections resulted in Lewis being educated at Oxford for a diplomatic career. Lewis found the work he did in the British embassy in Holland tedious, so with a head full of ghost stories from his early reading and travel, he turned his efforts to writing
The Monk. He completed the novel in a few months at the age of nineteen. When his father died in 1812, Lewis inherited a sizable plantation in Jamaica and began working to improve the conditions of the slaves there. On a return trip in 1818, Lewis died of illness and was buried at sea.
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