Matthew Gregory Lewis was nineteen when he wrote The Monk, and it made him instantly, controversially famous: a bestseller so full of seduction, incest, torture, and a demon in the form of a beautiful woman that critics demanded it be prosecuted, and Lewis quietly revised later editions to soften what he’d written under his own name as a sitting Member of Parliament.
Ambrosio, the monk of the title, begins the book as Madrid’s most celebrated preacher — proud of his own virtue in a way that reads, two centuries later, as the novel’s real warning. Lewis is less interested in showing evil as a temptation from outside than as something that grows fastest in a mind convinced of its own purity, with nothing left to check it.
Erato Press restores the original, uncensored 1796 text — the version that scandalized London, before Lewis’s own later revisions blunted it.
Enjoyed this piece?
Get the next one — our essays on the classics and news of each new Erato Press edition — straight to your inbox.