The Faux Gothic Castle that Started It All

Today, April 17th, is the publication day for my eighth historical thriller, The Versailles Formula.

Seeing my novel out in the world is exciting and not a little nerve-wracking. I came up with the idea to write a third Genevieve Planche novel in early 2022, so I’ve had these characters and settings rolling around in my head for three years. Now comes the time when the people and places of my imagination meet the reading public.

Set in 1766, the novel revolves around a spirited artist named Genevieve Planche, born in an East London family of French Huguenot refugees. I am descended from a French Huguenot settler in New Amsterdam (renamed New York City) and I wanted to draw on my heritage when creating Genevieve and her family.

Here’s the plot of the novel:

May 1766: Genevieve Sturbridge lives a quiet life in the countryside with her husband and son. But an invitation to dine at Sir Horace Walpole’s eerie Gothic estate pulls her back into a deadly world of espionage. Genevieve uncovers a shocking secret – a rare pigment of pure blue is being produced again. Coveted by royalty, chemists, and spies, the formula is priceless . . . and lethal. Only Genevieve can recognise the formula and discover the truth before time runs out, because this time the price of failure will cost more than just her own life.

I like the way Susan Elia MacNeal, author of the bestselling Maggie Hope series, describes my novel in her blurb:

The Versailles Formula is the continuing compelling adventure of whip-smart and determined heroine Genevieve Planche. It’s replete with spies, political intrigue, gorgeous Gothic manor houses, romance, impeccably researched history–and the shocking history of the color blue.”

Susan Elia MacNeal

Susan picked up on one aspect of the novel that many other early reviewers did: the importance of the Gothic castle and the Gothic atmosphere. Of all the books I’ve written, this one leans into Gothic the most. In this, I was following my fascination with Sir Horace Walpole, the owner, builder, and impresario of Strawberry Hill, an incredible estate near London. Walpole is considered the founder of Gothic Revival architecture and the author of the first Gothic novel and even the originator of “found footage” promotion. Yes, he was busy.

In this post on Miss Demeanors, I thought I would share how Sir Horace Walpole’s grip on my imagination led to The Versailles Formula.

How a Book Idea Begins to Take Shape

I first came across Sir Horace Walpole when I was researching The Fugitive Colours, the second book in my Genevieve Planche series. This novel takes place in the art world of 1764 London, a rivalrous and bickering world indeed. One of the novel’s main characters is a real-life painter, Joshua Reynolds, who was considered the most successful artist in England, but he had a sharply competitive nature and insisted on being treated as the best. This provoked Sir Horace Walpole to say, “If Sir Joshua is satisfied with his own departed pictures, it is more than the possessors or posterity will be. I think he ought to be paid in annuities for so long as his pictures last.” And this comment was made by someone whose portrait Reynolds painted–more than once!

Walpole, the youngest son of Prime Minister Robert Walpole, was one of England’s most celebrated wits and letter writers at a time when this was a highly valued art form. I longed to put him in a room with Joshua Reynolds, but he was too “big” a personality for a successful cameo. So I left him out–and yet I kept thinking about him and reading about him. And once I’d plunged down the rabbit hole of his home, Strawberry Hill, I became more and more determined to put the erudite and caustic Sir Horace into a novel. This was a fairytale villa packed with pointed arches, battlements, towers, pinnacles, and stained glass windows.

In the 18th century, Strawberry Hill and its owner were described by some people with the same sneer that Walpole bestowed on Joshua Reynolds. “Medievalist fantasy” is one of the kinder quips. It helps to understand their puzzlement if you grasp contemporary taste in architecture, which was characterized by symmetry and Palladian elegance. In the mid-18th century, no one was particularly caught up in the history of the Plantagenets or the Tudors. This was the age of the Enlightenment!

Sir Horace Walpole clearly didn’t care. He came from a family that provided him with independent income and, while he was a member of Parliament, that didn’t seem to take too much time away from his real interests. For thirty years, he added rooms to his house and items to his collection, ranging from Renaissance suits of armor to a clock Henry VIII gave Anne Boleyn. Creating this fantastical house would seem to be achievement enough. But Walpole launched the Strawberry Hill Press, publishing his friends’ poetry and travel writing. Perhaps this was when he came up with the idea to write a novel…

The Birth of the First Gothic Novel

Sir Horace Walpole said that the idea for The Castle of Otranto came to him in a dream. In a letter to a friend, he wrote:

“Shall I even confess to you what was the origin of the romance? I waked one morning, in the beginning of last June, from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle ( a very natural dream for a head filled, like mine, with Gothic story), and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase, I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowledge in the least what I intended to say or relate. “

Sir Horace Walpole

I can only conclude that Walpole built a home that created an environment for a dream to take place, one that inspired a novel.

But he did not initially publish it under his name. In 1765, it was announced that a manuscript dated to the 15th century had been discovered, in Italian, in the castle of an old Northern family in England. The manuscript was supposedly translated, and the book was then published on Dec. 24, 1765, with the title The Castle of Otranto, a Story, Translated by William Marshal, Gent., From the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicolas at Otranto.

The novel, telling the tale of a sinister aristocrat who loses his son in a ghostly accident and tries to force his son’s fiancée to marry him instead, was a sensation. Books sold out, and people talked about little else. Only then did the truth emerge: This book was written not in Italy centuries ago but by Sir Horace Walpole in 1765. He took credit in a second edition and gave the book a subtitle never used before: “A Gothic Story.”

More than two centuries before the phenomenon of Blair Witch Project, “found footage” media was born.

My Ode to Strawberry Hill

The more I read about Strawberry Hill and The Castle of Otranto, the more I realized that this was impossible to resist. I was considering writing a third Genevieve Planche novel, and the timing was perfect. Walpole’s novel was published in 1765, the same year that The Fugitive Colours‘ story ended.

I decided to set a story of a haunting within the walls of Strawberry Hill–and Genevieve would be invited to a dinner party to hear the tale from a frightened Walpole. This would serve as the launching point for a whole other plot I also had in mind: Genevieve’s return to espionage.

I like to think that Sir Horace Walpole wouldn’t mind.

The Versailles Formula is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org.

And Strawberry Hill in Twickenham is open for tours!

Nancy Bilyeau

Nancy Bilyeau is the author of eight novels and one novella of historical suspense. Her latest thriller, ‘The Versailles Formula, set in 18th-century Europe, will be published in spring 2025. A former staff editor at Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, and InStyle, Nancy lives with her family in the Hudson Valley in New York.

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