[Teresa Edgerton]

You don't call a book with a mad first wife hidden in the attic a gothic thriller? In my youth, there was a whole genre of these written for female readers, and they were all modeled after Jane Eyre. It was in that sense that I used the term.

But I can assure you that Charlotte Bronte's contemporaries did not regard
Jane Eyre as a boring book. If you read some of the reviews that were published at the time, you'd think the story was near pornographic.

Of course -- bringing the conversation back on topic -- Le Fanu, being a man, was able to write about a lot of things that would have been unacceptable coming from the Bronte sisters.