Gothic Novel, type of romantic fiction that predominated in English literature in the last third of the 18th century and the first two decades of the 19th century, the setting for which was usually a ruined Gothic castle or abbey (see Gothic Art and Architecture). The Gothic novel, or Gothic romance, emphasized mystery and horror and was filled with ghost-haunted rooms, underground passages, and secret stairways. The principal writers of the English Gothic romance were Horace Walpole, author of The Castle of Otranto (1764); Clara Reeve, who wrote The Champion of Virtue (1777); Ann Radcliffe, author of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); Matthew Gregory Lewis, author of Ambrosio, or the Monk (1796); Charles Robert Maturin, who wrote The Fatal Revenge (1807); and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein (1818). Charles Brockden Brown, the first American professional novelist, is best known for his Gothic romances. The genre was one phase of the literary movement of romanticism in English literature and was also the forerunner of the modern mystery novel (see Mystery Story). Later American writers who used Gothic elements in their fiction include Henry James, William Faulkner, and Flannery O'Connor. The term Gothic is also used to designate narrative prose or poetry of which the principal elements are violence, horror, and the supernatural. Many of the works of the late-20th-century American novelists Stephen King and Anne Rice demonstrate the continued influence and popularity of the Gothic form.