Charles Brockden Brown's novels are most often remembered as gothic fiction -- but he wasn't at all writing the sort of thing Ann Radcliffe was in his years writing on the other side of the Atlantic. His books were often violent, and full of the pointy-headed intellectuality of his day: they were drawn from late-Enlightenment scientific and medical thinking. Perhaps they're in debt to Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Holcroft -- and perhaps to the German "Schauer-romantik" of Friedrich Schiller. He built plots around motifs like sleepwalking and religious mania.

Jane Talbot is an epistolary novel, (that is, a novel in the form of a series of letters), and, like all of Brown's works, it's a gripping tale, and more than a little gothic. Enjoy!