This collection of 13 essays examines the work of Victorian authors Wilkie Collins, M.E. Braddon, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Mary Wollstonecraft, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James and Charlotte Bronte. Each essay explores the authors' use of archetypal Gothic elements, such as dark secrets and forbidden sensations, to depict nineteenth-century attitudes to class, gender, race, colonialism and imperialism.