Henry Summersett, the author of a number of extremely scarce Gothic romances with lurid, alluring titles like Mad Man of the Mountain, Final Retribution, and The Wizard and the Sword, is one of the most fascinating and mysterious of the forgotten novelists of the long eighteenth century. His dark, brooding, and often shocking novels, told in a unique prose style influenced heavily by Shakespearean tragedy and German Romanticism, are intriguing rediscoveries that will be of great interest to scholars and fans of classic Gothic fiction alike. In Leopold Warndorf (1800), Summersett combines the two dominant modes of popular fiction of the era, infusing a sentimental novel with a heavy dose of Gothic gloom. The title character is a young man of beauty and virtue who finds himself unjustly shunned by the world because his birth was illegitimate. Many years earlier, the libertine Baron Altenburg had seduced Leopold"s mother, the ingenuous Josephine, who then died in childbirth....