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Welcome , Dear Reader, to The Gothic Novel, a Parody, Homage, or What you Will....

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ABout The Author




Zeppo Brontë (1822-1842) was the youngest daughter of Rev. Patrick Brontë and his wife, Maria. Though eclipsed by her elder sisters, Zeppo was a prolific writer who produced thousands of pages of prose in her short life. Her only published work, The Gothic Novel, was published posthumously after being lightly edited by her sister Charlotte, who would often point to it as evidence that she was the only talented writer in the family. A troubled young woman, Zeppo died at age 20 from an overdose of laudanum.



About the Editor




Helen Scott is the foremost (indeed, the only) scholar of Rightly-Dismissed 19th Century Novelists. She has been immersed in the work of Zeppo Brontë since college, when she arrived in class after all the other Brontës were taken. She has created this new, revised edition with reference to Zeppo’s unpublished papers, including her recently discovered journal. Her aim is to make this little-read and rarely understood work accessible to a wider audience while maintaining the spirit of the original.
 
 
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The Gothic Novel


Original Introduction




A Gothic Novel, according to the only source I bothered to check in writing my clever introduction, is a novel which employs the melodramatic and supernatural. Common themes are bleeding ghosts, mist. moors, romantic ruins, melancholy and dark secrets.

What genre could better fit my life? For, like all college students, I live in a mouldering, haunted old building. Though virtuous, I am on all sides beset by sin. And if things got any more melodramatic, I would be tied to the train tracks by a man with a twisty moustache.

Thus, I (or, my alter ego Zeppo Brontë) give you my life (and the lives of my real and imaginary friends), magically transmuted through the writer’s art into something that is part novel, part inside joke, but manages to transcend both to become something new and completely useless.



Editor’s Introduction




As is perhaps unsurprising, much of The Gothic Novel no longer makes sense (that’s presuming it made sense at some point, which may be over generous). In revising, I’ve attempted to explain what needs explaining and remove what’s no longer relevant. I’ve tried to create something that works on its own as a satire of the genre, but still tells a story about my experience in the early ‘00s. In the tradition of my first attempt, I’ve created an alter-ego for myself, obscure literary scholar Helen Scott.

 

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