Walpole continued to tantalise, 'I have less repugnance for my Castle of Otranto which could be passed off as a joke but a tragedy with a revolting subject, there's a curiosity' (4:316). Five years later, the poor woman was still pleading for a copy.

tragedy has many faults, but at least it doesn't resemble the calculated and regulated tone of the century', and added frustratingly, 'I don't have time to talk to you about it today, and I don't know if I should talk to you about it' (4:40). His devoted correspondent Mine du Deffand wrote to him from Paris enquiring about the subject of the play: 'I have an inexpressible curiosity. But if his attitude to Otranto was ambivalent, his policy of simultaneously offering and withholding The Mysterious Mother could be called pathological - in certain cases, even sadistic. As time went on, the author's attitude continued to shift between rebellious pride and embarrassed disavowal. Originally presented as a medieval manuscript, it was then re-submitted to the public as a slap in the face of neoclassical taste. The ambivalent manner of Otranto's first publication has received quite a lot of attention in recent criticism. He writes to Montagu, 'I will not tell you more of it, as you would not bear the subject.' (2) But here, in the same letter, begins a game that Walpole would continue to play with many of his circle, the press, and the reading public almost until his death. The following month he wrote to George Montagu to announce that their friends John Chute and Thomas Gray the poet had approved the work. The completion of the drama was an important event for him his second serious attempt at imaginative creation.

(1) A little more than two years later he finished the five-act tragedy, after some delay occasioned by a visit to France and preparation of Historic Doubts on the Reign of Richard III. He began writing it, secretly, on Christmas Day 1766, exactly two years after the publication of The Castle of Otranto. WALPOLE MADE A MYSTERY of The Mysterious Mother.

The castle of otranto sparknotes