The Monk (review)

Matthew Lewis’s 1796 novel The Monk stands out as a key Gothic text with its combination of Gothic tropes, political subtext, and sexually explicit material. The novel received so much attention when it was first published that, as is well known, it led the author to be nicknamed ‘Monk’ Lewis for the rest of his life. The resulting controversy was not all together positive, to say the least; Coleridge summed it up nicely when he declared in his review, ‘The Monk is a romance which if a parent saw in the hands of a son or daughter, he might reasonably turn pale.’ Coleridge’s concern stemmed in part from the fact that there was an amazing fancy for the Gothic at the time. Its frenzy spared no social class of the English society: everybody was reading Gothic novels; readers were recruited among the leading figures of the world as well as among the humble, as Jane Austen would show to great effect in her Gothic parody Northanger Abbey.

Like previous scholarly editions of The Monk, D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf’s edition is based on the first edition of Lewis’s novel since, as the editors note, ‘the critical consensus, which we endorse, is that the later lifetime editions represent successive retreats from, rather than refinements on, the author’s original vision.’ (The editors include in one of their appendices their collations of all five editions for readers interested in seeing how Lewis responded to the controversy.) The introduction is succinct, yet informative, and is built around the four sections of the appendix (‘Literary Sources,’ ‘Historical Contexts,’ ‘Critical Reception,’ and ‘Cultural Responses’). The biographical sketch is concise and to the point, and nicely complemented by a brief chronology of Lewis’s life. Students could probably benefit from an expanded chronology that sets up the novel within its historical period and amid other key literary publications of the time. The edition as a whole benefits from the many insights of D.L. Macdonald’s excellent biography of Lewis (University of Toronto Press, 2000), as well as from the skills of the editors, skills that had already been demonstrated in their Broadview editions of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindications (1997) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1999). The present edition attests once again to their editorial rigour, as attested by their choice of text and their collation work presented in the variants appendix, as well in the many footnotes, which will answer most queries raised by undergraduate and graduate students. This is clearly the best edition of The Monk available.