Lewis owned considerable property in Jamaica, within four miles of Savanna-la-Mer, or Savanna-la-Mar, which was hit by a devastating earthquake and hurricane in 1779.

On 23 July 1781, when Matthew was six and his youngest sister one-and-a-half years old, Frances left her husband, taking the music master, Samuel Harrison, as her lover.

After formally accusing his wife of adultery through the Consistory Court of the Bishop of London on 27 February 1783, he petitioned the House of Lords for permission to bring about a bill of divorce.

There he acted in the Town Boys' Play as Falconbridge in King John and then My Lord Duke in James Townley's farce, High Life Below Stairs.

Lewis frequently complained about the obligation to learn classical languages at Oxford, and spent much of the actual time of his degree abroad in Germany working as a German diplomat.

[3] Intended for a diplomatic career like his father, Lewis spent most of his school vacations abroad, studying modern languages.

In March 1792, Lewis translated the French opera Felix and sent it to Drury Lane, hoping to earn money for his mother.

In Germany, he even translated Wieland's Oberon, a difficult work of poetry which earned him the respect of his acquaintance Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

[citation needed] While Lewis pursued these literary ambitions, mainly to earn money for his mother, he gained through his father's influence a position as an attaché to the British embassy in The Hague.

He found at local bars (his favourite being Madame de Matignon's Salon) friends among visiting French aristocracy fleeing revolutionary France, but nonetheless, Lewis saw The Hague as a place of boredom and disliked its Dutch citizens.

[10] There Lewis produced in ten weeks his romance Ambrosio or The Monk, which was published anonymously in the summer of the following year and immediately gained him celebrity.

In the second edition, Lewis cited himself as the author and as a Member of Parliament (for Hindon in Wiltshire), and removed what he assumed were the objectionable passages, but the work retained much of its horrific character.

During his visit, he saw William Adamson's production of Adelgitha, and complained about the performance of John Castello, the "West Indian Roscius" who played the role of Lothair.

As a writer, Lewis is typically classified as writing in the Gothic horror genre, along with the authors Charles Maturin and Mary Shelley.

In fact, Lewis actually wrote a letter to his mother a few months before he began writing The Monk, stating that he saw a resemblance between the villain Montoni from The Mysteries of Udolpho and himself.

Beginning with The Monk, Lewis starts the novel with an advertisement: The first idea of this Romance was suggested by the story of the Santon Barsisa, related in The Guardian.

– The Bleeding Nun is a tradition still credited in many parts of Germany; and I have been told, that the ruins of the Castle of Lauenstein, which She is supposed to haunt, may yet be seen upon the borders of Thuringia.

[17] Lewis's monodrama The Captive tells of a woman consigned to a mental asylum by her husband against her will, who gradually drives herself mad through the terrible spectacles she witnesses there.

It is a short script of only a few pages, but one that was performed over a few hours, giving the impression that much of the work must have taken place in slow recreation of physical violence within the asylum.

The Morning Chronicle's review suggests "the tears of an audience have generally been accounted the highest species of applause... [but] a poet must have an odd taste who would be rewarded with hysteric fits."

[citation needed] Lewis provided many epilogues and introductions for other performances put on in the Drury Lane Theatre, most often for Thomas Holcroft.

[citation needed] Lewis wrote in 1801 a satire on the reception of his work under the pseudonym "Maritius Moonshine", in which he slanders his own writings as "loathesome [sic] spectacles" and insults himself for being a poor MP ("thy brighter parts are lost, / And the state's welfare by a Goblin croft").