Lovecraft's meticulously researched essay covers a broad spectrum, attempting to present a comprehensive historical account of horror literature, with insights into the nature, development and history of the weird tale.
Clara Reeve's The Old English Baron (1777), Ann Radcliffe's The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland: or, the Transformation (1798), all followed Walpole's success, contributing each in its own way to the enrichment of the genre.
In the section titled "The Apex of Gothic Romance", Lovecraft discusses Matthew Gregory Lewis's very popular novel The Monk (1797) and Charles Maturin's underrated masterpiece Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), which evokes Molière's Dom Juan, Goethe's Faust, and Byron's Manfred.
Special mention is made of Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Guy de Maupassant, Ambrose Bierce, and Arthur Conan Doyle, accompanied by Lovecraft's own opinions and insights in their work.
"[3] After the first publication, the critic Edmund Wilson, who was not an admirer of Lovecraft's fiction, praised the recent essay as a "really able piece of work... he had read comprehensively in this field—he was strong on the Gothic novelists—and writes about it with much intelligence".