Book description
With an essay by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
'He now saw himself stained with the most loathed and monstrous
sins, the object of universal execration ... doomed to perish in
tortures the most severe'
Shocking, erotic and violent, The Monk is the story of
Ambrosio, torn between his spiritual vows and the temptations of
physical pleasure. His internal battle leads to sexual obsession, rape
and murder, yet this book also contains knowing parody of its own
excesses as well as social comedy. Written by Matthew Lewis when he
was only nineteen, it was a ground-breaking novel in the Gothic Horror
genre and spawned hundreds of imitators, drawn in by its mixture of
bloodshed, sex and scandal.
The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in
English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the
beginning of the First World War.
Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818) was educated at Oxford, after which
he held a position in the British Embassy at The Hague. It was there
that he wrote
The Monk
, under the influence of the early German romantics. Its publication in
1796 was highly controversial, due to both Lewis' new status as MP and
the novel itself, which many critics savaged for its supposed profanity
and obscenity. A masterpiece of Gothic fiction,
The Monk
was revised after first publication to avoid charges of blasphemy. This
edition features the original, unrevised 1796 text.
