The Anaconda (Dodo Press)

Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818) was a British author. From Westminster School, he passed to Christ Church, Oxford. Already he was busy over tales and plays, and wrote at college a farce, never acted, a comedy, The East Indian, and also a novel, never published, called The Effusions of Sensibility, which was a burlesque upon the sentimental school. He wrote also what he called "a romance in the style of The Castle of Otranto, " which appeared afterwards as the play of The Castle Spectre (1796). His father's desire was to train him for the diplomatic service, and in the summer of 1794 he went to the Hague as attache to the British Embassy. He had begun to write his novel The Monk: A Romance (1796), but was spurred on at the Hague by a reading of Mrs. Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, a book after his own heart. His other works include: The Bravo of Venice: A Romance (1804).