The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne

rdf:langString The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne

rdf:langString The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne

rdf:langString The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne

rdf:langString Radcliffe

rdf:langString England

rdf:langString English

rdf:langString Print

rdf:langString Thomas Hookham

rdf:langString The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne

rdf:langString The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne is a gothic novel by Ann Radcliffe, first published in London by Thomas Hookham in 1789. In her introduction to the 1995 Oxford World Classic's edition of the text, Alison Milbank stated that the novel's plot "unites action of a specifically Scottish medieval nature with the characterization and morality of the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility." The novel, subtitled "A Highland Tale", is set in the feudal Scottish Highlands and centred around the two titular castles of Athlin and Dunbayne. Whilst Athlin – "an edifice built on the summit of a rock whose base was in the sea" – is home to a refined society headed by the gentle Countess Matlida and her children, Dunbayne is the domain of the villainous Baron Malcolm. The novel's plot follows the young Earl of Athlin, Osbert, who seeks to take revenge against the unlawful murder of his father by the Baron Malcolm twelve years earlier after meeting the peasant Alleyn (who is later revealed to be the true heir to the castle of Dunbayne). Though significantly shorter than Radcliffe's later and more famous novels (chiefly The Mysteries of Udolpho), in The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne Radcliffe began to shape many of the themes and conventions that would later come to define her work.