Gothic fiction emerged in the late 18th century, with Horace Walpole’s “The Castle of Otranto” marking the beginning of a genre obsessed with mystery, decay, and the unquiet past. Born from the ruins of the Enlightenment, it was a reaction against reason, a return to shadow and emotion. Its stories unfold in desolate castles, remote manors, and mist-covered landscapes, where the boundaries between the living and the dead blur and human desire becomes a source of terror. It is a literature of confinement and revelation, of secrets unearthed and innocence undone.
Inspired by our favourite Gothic novels, each of us created an outfit as an homage -a wearable interpretation of that darkness and beauty that still haunts the imagination.
Stella’s
The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis (1796)
Gothic Literature attracts us like a bulb draws a moth. It’s simultaneously hauntingly beautiful and unsettling — you can’t really look away.
The Monk is textbook Gothic: it has lust, sin, moral decay, the devil, murder, dungeons, secret passages — you name it.
In the book, we follow the story of Ambrosio, a famed, austere monk. His faith is tested when his young mentee, a novice monk named Rosario, reveals himself to be a woman named Matilda. Unable to live up to his vows, the Monk gives in to every deviant temptation. In him, every tenet of pure, celibate monastic existence becomes corrupted and evil.
Soon, Matilda won’t be enough for him. His next prey will be Antonia, an innocent girl who comes to the monastery seeking help for her ill mother.
Determined to do whatever it takes to have her, Ambrosio accepts Matilda’s offer to use sorcery to get what he wants.
I’ll leave the rest for you to discover.
It is extraordinary that a 19-year-old in 1796 wrote, in just ten weeks, what would later become the most controversial Gothic novel of the 18th century. The Monk is considered part of the Gothic literary canon, a forerunner to the popular Gothic novels of the 19th century and an influence on the modern horror genre.
Alexandra’s
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1861)
This Tuesday night found me on my green sofa again, half-writing, half-staring into the middle distance, thinking about a novel that never fails to leave me a little hollow.
You know that strange ache when you finish a story and wish you could somehow rewrite it - just one choice, one moment - and maybe everything would’ve turned out differently? That’s Great Expectations for me. Every time. It’s like watching a horror movie where the girl goes down into the basement, and you’re yelling at the screen, don’t go there. But she does. They always do. And that’s Pip — walking straight into heartbreak with his eyes wide open.
Dickens gives us this boy who grows up wanting so badly to be more. To rise, to belong, to be loved by the one person who was never going to love him back. He’s given a chance - money, education, “expectations” - but what he really wants is Estella. And Estella is a storm you cannot win against. She’s all frost and silence and impossible beauty.
And then there’s Miss Havisham, probably the most “gothic” character in this Dickens’ story, living in the decaying Satis House. A wealthy, half-crazed bride still in her yellowing wedding dress, frozen in the exact minute she was jilted. The clocks have all stopped, the cake has rotted on the table, and the curtains never open again. She raises Estella to break men’s hearts, to make the world feel the same pain she did, and in doing so, she ruins them both.
Estella moves through the world like she’s allergic to warmth. And yet, you can’t stop hoping that somewhere under all that ice, there’s something real.
For me, the 1998 film adaptation of Great Expectations was style-wise iconic. We all remember Gwyneth Paltrow as Estella, decked out in Donna Karan’s spring/summer ’96 green-on-green wardrobe.
Emerald, moss, olive - shades that really shouldn’t work together, and yet somehow do - appear throughout the film, on both Estella and Miss Havisham. But why green? I like to think it’s because green has long been associated with envy. The saying “green with envy” actually has some surprisingly old roots: the ancient Greeks believed that an overproduction of bile, which they thought looked yellowish-green, could make someone’s face pale or green when they were jealous.
Estella, in both book and film, is a masterpiece of contradictions. She is presented as modern, super sleek, untouchable, and cold, but not because she is actually cold, but because she’s protecting something, the absence of love, maybe, or the ghost of it.
Dickens wrote her as this tragic paradox: a woman designed to break hearts, only to find out she has one herself. She tells Pip, “I have no heart — if that has anything to do with my memory.” But of course she does. She’s just been taught that having one is dangerous. And I think that’s why we keep circling back to her. Estella is cruel because basically that’s the language she was taught. And Pip (poor, devoted Pip) keeps trying to translate her.
There’s this line : “Her contempt for me was so strong, it became infectious, and I caught it.” That’s how love sometimes feels, isn’t it? You fall for someone who doesn’t - or can’t - love you back, and slowly you start to see yourself through their disinterest. You start catching their cold.
Valisia’s
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898)
One of my most vivid childhood memories takes me back to the long summer nights at my family’s seaside house, when all the neighbourhood kids would gather beneath the dim glow of the corner lamppost to share ghost stories. That was where it all began — my lifelong fascination with the Gothic and the supernatural. Since then, I’ve devoured nearly every tale of haunted minds and decaying manors from the 18th and 19th centuries. I love them all, yet The Turn of the Screw holds a dear place in my heart. I had already read Henry James’s eerie novella when I watched The Innocents, its chilling and exquisitely shot film adaptation, an experience that deepened my admiration and sealed its place among my most cherished Gothic works.
The Turn of the Screw is one of those rare stories that refuses to settle, hovering between the supernatural and the psychological, between innocence and corruption. On the surface, it tells the story of a young governess hired to care for two children, Miles and Flora, at a secluded country estate called Bly. Her employer, a charming but distant man, makes it clear that he is not to be disturbed with any requests or reports. The governess, eager to impress and to appear competent, accepts his terms unquestioningly. A desire to please that slowly becomes her undoing.
As she begins her new life at Bly, the house’s serenity soon feels uncanny. The children are ethereally beautiful, almost too perfect, and she is dazzled by them, convinced that such loveliness must reflect purity. But when Miles is expelled from school for mysterious reasons, her confidence begins to tremble. The housekeeper’s reluctance to speak about the past and the sudden reappearance (or perhaps imagination) of two deceased servants, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, deepen the sense of dread. The governess’s need to protect the children from unseen corruption soon borders on hysteria, and James leaves us to wonder: are these phantoms real, or is she merely haunted by her own repression and fear?
Jack Clayton’s The Innocents captures this ambiguity with remarkable grace. Deborah Kerr’s governess seems perpetually suspended between control and collapse, her terror mirrored by the emptiness of the estate. The film turns James’s subtle horror into chilling visual moments — the still, ghostly figures glimpsed through windows, the oppressive quiet, the sensation that the house itself is conspiring to keep its secrets.
It’s a world where nothing is overtly shown, yet everything feels contaminated. That, perhaps, is the true genius of The Turn of the Screw: its horror lies not in what we see, but in what we can’t quite trust ourselves to believe.
Stories like The Turn of the Screw remind me why Gothic horror never truly loosens its grip on the imagination. It thrives in the spaces between certainty and doubt, between what is seen and what is merely felt. For me, that tension, that beauty wrapped around something quietly sinister, is the essence of the Gothic. It’s not simply about ghosts or decaying houses, but about the delicate collapse of reason under the weight of desire, fear, and mystery. And perhaps that’s why I keep returning to it, to that thin veil between the real and the imagined, where all true hauntings begin.
Happy haunting!
Stella + Alexandra + Valisia