What such plots amount to is a sort of ritualized absolution of the traditional Gothic villain, as, in one story after another, the violent, terrifying Grand, Dark Man in his Grand, Dark House is shown to be guiltless, or at least more sinned against than sinning. In these stories, just because someone looks like a Gothic villain, behaves like a Gothic villain and lives in the sort of house which one would expect a Gothic villain to inhabit does not mean that they are necessarily evil, or undeserving of love; and they thus steadily prepared the way for later Gothic romances, in which even inhuman monsters such as vampires could be forgiven and redeemed.

— The Twilight Of The Gothic? by Joseph Crawford (Page 94)