The castle in Eliza Parsons’s Gothic novel “The Castle of Wolfenbach” is called Wolfenbach.
The name appears in the novel’s title and identifies the gloomy ancestral building around which much of the story’s mystery and danger develops. Like many Gothic settings, Wolfenbach is more than a backdrop: its isolation, age, secrets, and threatening atmosphere help shape the plot and place an innocent heroine in peril.
Parsons’s novel was first published in 1793 by the Minerva Press. Its story uses familiar Gothic ingredients, including a distressed young woman, hidden family scandals, sinister confinement, and a final struggle between good and evil. The title’s castle name is therefore easy to confuse with the names of other famous Gothic locations, especially Otranto and Udolpho.
“The Castle of Wolfenbach” is also remembered because Jane Austen included it in the list of “horrid novels” Isabella Thorpe recommends in “Northanger Abbey.” That reference helped preserve Parsons’s work in literary history, even though Ann Radcliffe’s “The Mysteries of Udolpho” became far more famous.