The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis

Has anyone else read this? Holy cow!

I finally decided to read The Monk (by Matthew Gregory Lewis), the scandalous Gothic novel originally published in 1796. I'm more than 60% of the way through and doing much better than I have with many older Gothic classics. (Can you believe I still have to read Ann Radcliffe!? )

If you think a novel published in 1796 can't still shock and scandalize today's readers, you should give The Monk a try. But don't read it if you don't like old-fashioned Catholic-bashing, truly icky ghosts, demonic elements, murder and other violence... And yes, rape and other horrible things happening to women. If you thought Thomas Covenant was a prick, he will come off as a prince compared to the Ambrosio, the Monk of the title.

Sure, it's a novel of a its time, so it goes off in tangents, and sometimes blathers away about certain characters when you wish it would get back to the MONK, damn it. (As in, "What is he going to do next?! No, shut up about Lorenzo already...")

It's also available as a free e-text through Project Gutenberg and so forth.

Lady MacBeth said:

I read it in university and couldn't put it down. After reading your post, I may pick it up again. Great book!

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Usually, when I couldn't put a book down in school, it was one I had picked out for myself. Well except for the plays we read for Virginia Francisco's theater class, and the BioLab book, and most of the Shakespeare plays I "had" to read. And that story about spot becoming a mop...

Medievalist said:

I love reading and teaching it .

Lots of fun to read side-by-side with Austen's Northanger Abbey.

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Oh that would be a lot of fun! Once I finish, I also plan to buy the Valancourt Books edition of The New Monk, a parody of The Monk that Valancourt says "ironically descends to a level even more grotesque and shocking than The Monk."


It's amazing to me that for years, scholars thought Austen had made up some of the titles of the Gothics. It took some "Gothic" sleuthing to find out that the titles her characters mentioned were all real books. It's also a shame she wrote it before Francis Lathom published the book with one of the greatest titles ever... The Impenetrable Secret, Find it Out!

BTW there is a 99 cent ebook that reprints the "Northanger Abbey Horrid Novels" plus two extra novels. Valancourt Books has also reprinted the "Northanger Abbey Horrid Novels" -- for example, The Midnight Bell by Francis Lathom. Their editions often include detailed scholarly introductions and "Notes on the Text." For example, they prefer to leave most of the typos and grammatical oddities to give readers a flavor of what it was like to read these books when they came out. I think they have a point as that gives the books an Gothic exotic flair and a real glimpse into earlier times -- although the Capitalization in The Monk does drive me up the Wall at times.

Medievalist said:

For those wondering what on Earth we're talking about.

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I like the illustrations on that page. I'm tempted to find high resolution copies so I can use them in a decoupage box or something. I'd probably use illustrations from Walpole, Maturin, etc.

Yes, I have strange tastes in decoupage. I made an M. R. James box and a 20th century Gothic romance box, and a tissue cover box with Papa Emeritus of Ghost.

Last night, I finished it! I think my reaction was along the lines of "Wait, he's going to do what... No he isn't. Oh he did. Uh-oh! Eek!"


I would have finished it sooner, but I needed to be in the right place and time. I decided it might be too distracting to read the end just before going to work.

Atalanta said:

I started The Monk with some trepidation, but I loved it right up until the climactic scene down in the catacombs. The violence just got to be too much for me at that point and I put it down for almost two months. I recently picked it back up again and finished it, and I have to say I loved it and hated it at the same time. I'm really not the sort of person who should read stories like that (it hit me much harder than Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, for example), so I almost regret it -- but wow, it was eye-opening to find something so graphic and horrifying from that era!

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Yeah, that catacombs scene... I have lots of CDs and MP3 albums with skeletons and skulls, and even some shirts with skeletons. But that scene still freaked me out. Ugh. It went beyond what even most of the black metal bands could come up with.

I thought the opening of the lesser-known "Manfroné; or, The One-Handed Monk" was something else. But it didn't compare.

gypsyscarlett said:

LOVE this novel. It's the only one I can remember reading where I kept going, omfg. The whole story is just...wow.

It definitely has very uncomfortable elements within (racism and sexism). More than once, I felt my blood start to boil. But if you can sigh, accept it for the time it was written, then it's an amazing reading experience. Plot and character-wise. Matilda!

As for Ann Radcliffe, I've never been able to finish any of her novels. Tried a few times but found them rather tedious.

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Yes, Matilda kept surprising me. I want to use Matilda in a pen name or something. Then go to a Catholic mass just to piss off M. G. Lewis.

gypsyscarlett said:

I was thinking with the right director, this could make one hell of a flim. Or perhaps, even better, to cover the full scope of the novel, a mini-series.

It's been a long time since there's been a good old true Gothic on the screen- theater or tv. And this one has everything in it.

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Has anyone seen the French adaptation that came out this year? I must admit I bought it through iTunes, but I haven't managed to watch it yet. The problem with movies with subtitles is that I can't watch the movie and read a book (or play Wurdle or write a novel or play Extreme Road Trip 2) at the same time.

I think this is one of those cases where the digital version was released early, which is often a bad sign. Then again, adaptations of early Gothic novels probably don't do too well in the theater.

And now there is an audiobook edition! (It is by Whole Story Audiobooks, with a narrator I'm not familiar with, so I don't know how it will turn out. But I risked an Audible credit on it.)

There is also a free LibriVox edition here.