Henry Summersett, the author of a number of extremely scarce Gothic
romances with lurid, alluring titles like "Mad Man of the
Mountain," "Final Retribution," and "The Wizard and the Sword," is
one of the most fascinating and mysterious of the forgotten
novelists of the long eighteenth century. His dark, brooding, and
often shocking novels, told in a unique prose style influenced
heavily by Shakespearean tragedy and German Romanticism, are
intriguing rediscoveries that will be of great interest to scholars
and fans of classic Gothic fiction alike.
In "Leopold Warndorf" (1800), Summersett combines the two dominant
modes of popular fiction of the era, infusing a sentimental novel
with a heavy dose of Gothic gloom. The title character is a young
man of beauty and virtue who finds himself unjustly shunned by the
world because his birth was illegitimate. Many years earlier, the
libertine Baron Altenburg had seduced Leopold's mother, the
ingenuous Josephine, who then died in childbirth. The unhappy
outcast Leopold begins to see a brighter future ahead when he falls
in love with the lovely and charming Augusta and plans to wed her.
But little does he know that Augusta is in fact his sister, another
illegitimate offspring of the rakish Baron. The unsuspecting
Leopold is faced with tragedy on both sides: will he unknowingly
consummate an incestuous marriage with his sister, or will he
discover the truth and instead be forced to resign the only love he
has ever known?
Published by the legendary Minerva Press in 1800, Summersett's
powerful novel has never before been reprinted and is known to
survive in only two copies worldwide. This new edition reprints the
unabridged text of the original two-volume edition from the copy in
the British Library and features a new introduction and notes by
Steve Orman of Canterbury Christ Church University. Valancourt
Books has previously published Summersett's "Mad Man of the
Mountain" (1799) and "Martyn of Fenrose" (1801), and several of
Summersett's other rare works, also edited by Orman, are
forthcoming.
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