Partner Property
Strawberry Hill House: Find out more about Strawberry Hill House, or visit their website.
About the talk
Horace Walpole famously described his house at Strawberry Hill as his “little gothic castle” and, following the success of his novel, The Castle of Otranto, for the second edition he added the subheading “A Gothic Story” to the title – thus the literary genre of the Gothic novel began.
This talk explores the role that food and drink plays in classic and contemporary Gothic texts, varying from the withdrawal of food serving as a punishment to Mary Shelley’s vegetarian monster who, like Walpole, doesn’t “glut” his appetite with meat!
About the speaker
Dr Alessandra Pino is an expert on the edible and the Gothic. Alessandra was born in Hampstead, London, to an Italian mother and Venezuelan diplomat father, and grew up in several different countries. Holding university degrees in English Literature from Naples “L’Orientale” and having worked with a Michelin-starred chef for nearly ten years, Alessandra is a Ph.D. candidate at Westminster University where her studies focus on food in Gothic literature.