Collection: Eliza Parsons and Lawrence Flammenberg

Eliza Parsons was an English author best known for having penned two of the seven Northanger Horrid Novels. Parsons is presumed, based on a baptismal certificate, to have been born in 1739. She married James Parsons at age 21 and had eight children. She began writing, and over the course of the next seventeen years wrote nineteen novels and one play. Though prodigious, Parsons often struggled with money until her death in 1811. The Castle of Wolfenbach is her most famous work.

Lawrence Flammenberg was born Karl Friedrich Kahlert in 1765 and died in 1813. He also wrote under the pseudonym Ludwig Flammenberg. His work, Das Geisterbanner was translated into English by Peter Will (writing as Peter Tuethold) under a new title: The Necromancer; or, The Tale of the Black Forest. Kahlert is credited as a major influence for Matthew Lewis’s The Monk.