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novel, writes in a slightly different context, “Walpole’s castle would
become Gothic literature’s first unstable and unsafe world’’ (Frank 19).
Otranto castle, however, is only the first in a long line of Gothic
architectural structures that serve as labyrinths. The estate in Clara
Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778) contains secret doors and hidden
apartments, and perhaps the most labyrinth-like structure in all of Gothic
fiction is Ann Radcliffe’s ruined abbey in The Romance o f the Forest
(1791), a structure so daunting that it challenges the reader to render an
accurate