This series reimagines the escape of Isabella from Manfred in Horace Walpole’s ‘The Castle of Otranto’, the first Gothic novel, through a feminist lens. Rather than positioning Isabella as a passive figure fleeing patriarchal force, these artworks reclaim her narrative as one of resistance, intuition, and agency.

Each piece is steeped in the language of Gothic visual tradition; shadows; trapdoors; candlelight. They reorient the gaze away from spectacle and toward the inner world of the woman in flight. Isabella is not merely running from danger; she is moving toward self-determination, away from a lineage that seeks to control her body and story.

Informed by historical context and feminist literary critique, this series explores themes of entrapment and escape, fear and fortitude. The environments she passes through, corridors, crypts, foggy castle grounds, become metaphors for the psychological and societal structures women navigate even today.

This is not just a retelling, but a reclamation, where the Gothic heroine is not a victim of her genre, but the architect of her own survival.