The Gothic novels that flourished in the late eighteenth century—with their crumbling castles, imperiled heroines, and supernatural dread—were long treated by critics as escapist entertainment, a lowbrow indulgence beneath serious study. Recent scholarship has mounted a spirited challenge to that dismissal. Several critics now argue that the genre's very extravagance encoded pointed anxieties of the period: the decaying castle as an emblem of a crumbling aristocratic order, the trapped heroine as a figure for women's constrained legal status, the ghost as the return of a violent past that polite society preferred to forget. Not everyone is persuaded. Skeptics caution that reading every spectral moan as veiled political commentary risks projecting present-day preoccupations onto authors who may have sought only to thrill. Yet even these skeptics concede that the sheer popularity of the form makes it a valuable record of what its readers feared and desired.