M. G. Lewis

Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775–1818) was an English novelist and playwright, known to his contemporaries as Monk Lewis after the book that made him notorious. The son of a senior War Office official, he was educated at Westminster and Oxford and published The Monk in 1796 at the age of twenty; its mixture of religious horror and eroticism provoked outrage, and he revised later editions. He then wrote successful Gothic plays, notably The Castle Spectre, and sat in Parliament. Having inherited plantations in Jamaica, he made two voyages to improve the conditions of the enslaved people there and died of yellow fever on the return journey.