Our first chapter provides the initial way into our topic through a focus on popular fictions that employ Gothic tropes and figurations in conjunction with a relationship to Cornwall. Our core intention here is to identify some of the major ways in which Cornwall has been represented in fictions that are well known and designed for consumption by a popular audience. In keeping with our intention to place a nodal hub text, or body of work, at the heart of each chapter and then proceed to a discussion of other related texts in a comparative and relational way, we have chosen Daphne du Maurier's novel of 1951, My Cousin Rachel. We have chosen this text as, although there is far less work on it than on Rebecca, interest in the novel has picked up recently including a big-budget 2017 adaptation. Further, the Cornish landscape plays a central role in this novel, with the rolling hills, cliff tops and seascapes representing the wild and untameable. Crucially for our interests, the landscape is juxtaposed with the cultivated garden-space which serves as its mirror or uncanny double. This (Italian) garden presents as a deceptively controllable place but, it is in fact the place that admits entry to the Other in the form of the foreign, unacceptable, sexually charged figure of Rachel. Embodied through Rachel, these features key into themes of identity, desire, animism, and ambiguity that provide the basis on which our investigation of Gothic Cornwall rests.

Du Maurier has often been associated with the Gothic by scholars, beginning with Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik's Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination (1998). Such scholarship describes a biographical and more specifically autobiographical relationship between the author and the place. This chapter sidesteps this association and looks at the construction and imagining of the Gothic landscape itself in du Maurier's work and in the subsequent adaptations of her novels. As we will show, du Maurier's Cornish Gothic landscapes play a leading role in the construction of the Cornish landscape as a romantic terrain, a wilderness that is regularly employed as a means of promising both freedom and darkness. Throughout the book, we will examine the lure of fictionalising Cornwall as a space of seductive shadows.