Carl Friedrich August Grosse (5 June 1768 – 15 March 1847) also known as Edouard Romeo Vargas-Bedemar was a German author, translator, aesthetic philosopher, and mineralogist.
[1][2] In 1786, he enrolled at the University of Göttingen to study medicine, and began his literary career there with essays on the sublime and transmigration of the soul, as well as engaging in translation of works by Scottish moral philosopher and poet James Beattie.
In 1793 he moved to Italy, claiming to be Edouard Romeo, count of Vargas, a falsified title to which he added Baron Bedemar in 1795.
"[7] He also theorized that distance of sound (which he called "entfernung" had a key role in producing sublime experiences, writing "A soft music heard from afar is far more stirring than if heard in the concert hall; and the wavering tones of the distant [entfernung] set off the power of imagination into the realm of scattered images.
"[7] Grosse applied gothic landscape traditions to the mind, where psychological responses are framed in terms of physical spaces of light and dark.
Printed by Minerva Press, the book became well known to an English audience and was included by Jane Austen among seven 'horrid' novels in Northanger Abbey, alongside The Necromancer by Karl Friedrich Kahlert, The Castle of Wolfenbach by Eliza Parsons, Clermont by Regina Maria Roche, The Mysterious Warning, a German Tale, by Eliza Parsons, The Midnight Bell by Francis Lathom, and The Orphan of the Rhine by Eleanor Sleath.
Horrid Mysteries was the first to be re-found, by English author and collector Michael Sadleir, who encountered it alongside Roche's Children of the Abbey in 1922 at a bookstore on Oxford Street, London.