First up are the gothic romances, exemplified by Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) whose past is less a historical reconstruction than a surrealist dreamscape. Ann Radcliffe’s more “explained” Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) earned so wide a readership that the gothic romance was spoofable for Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey just four years later. Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) follows four generations of Anglo-Irish aristocrats prior to 1782, and has a strong claim to being the first modern “family saga” historical novel. With Walter Scott’s bestselling Waverley novels (from 1814), the genre was awarded a manifesto of sorts: “By fixing, then, the date of my story Sixty Years before this present 1st November, 1805, I would have my readers understand, that they will meet in the following pages neither a romance of chivalry nor a tale of modern manners; that my hero will neither have iron on his shoulders, as of yore, nor on the heels of his boots, as is the present fashion of Bond Street; and that my damsels will neither be clothed ‘in purple and in pall’, like the Lady Alice of an old ballad, nor reduced to the primitive nakedness of a modern fashionable at a rout.” Eschewing olde worlde balladry, Scott promised both historical accuracy and a rattling yarn.