Irish writer (and great-uncle of Oscar Wilde) best known as the author of Melmoth the Wanderer, the work considered by many to be the last traditional "Gothic" novel. Personally, I'd vote for Harrison Ainsworth's Rookwood; Melmoth may be less the last of its kind that one of the first of a new kind, or at least a transitional work that marks the evolution away from conventional Gothic and its reliance on external atmospherics to a more psychological Gothic. We're still a long way from "The Turn of the Screw," to be sure, for Maturin does not forsake mouldering ruins, subterranean spaces, depraved villains, skeleton monks and the like, but his powerful interest in the psychology of suffering and alienation makes this something much more sophisticated than most early Gothics.
Maturin wrote three dramas as well as a handful of novels; his first play, Bertram; or, the Castle of St. Aldobrand, was championed by Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, and was hugely popular, running for 22 nights (which was quite a substantial run for its time) in May of 1816 at the Drury Lane Theatre in London, the premier theater of the time. The play was savaged in a review by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who objected to its "jacobinism," its apparent celebration of emotional and psychological extremes which were subversive of established moral and social authority. Maturin's other dramas, Manuel and Fredolfo, were critical and financial disasters.
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