Horace Walpole

Walpole was the youngest son of Britain's first prime minister, and spent much of his life and fortune turning a small house at Twickenham into Strawberry Hill, a fantasy of battlements, pointed arches, and stained glass that essentially invented the Gothic Revival in architecture decades before it became fashionable.

The Castle of Otranto (1764) grew out of the same taste: he published the first edition as a supposed translation of a genuine medieval Italian manuscript, only admitting his authorship, and adding 'A Gothic Story' to the title, once its wild success made the deception safe to drop. He never wrote fiction again, spending his later decades on an enormous private correspondence, now a primary source for eighteenth-century English life.

He died unmarried in 1797, having inherited the earldom of Orford just two years earlier.