Orphaned and placed in the care of an aunt who marries badly, Emily St Aubert is carried off to a remote castle in the Apennines whose owner wants her estates. Radcliffe raises terror through landscape and suggestion, then explains every apparent haunting by natural means. Published in 1794, and the book Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey assumes its readers know.
Public domain in the EU (author died 1823). Source: Project Gutenberg.