The French Revolution influenced the English gothic novel. The gothic novel combines elements of terror and romance, and the supernatural. English novelist Fanny Burney wrote at the time of the French Revolution that, "There is nothing in old history that I shall any longer think fabulous; the destruction of the most wonderful empires on record has nothing more wonderful, nor of more sounding improbability, than the demolition of this great nation, which rises up against itself for its own ruin-perhaps annihilation." A year later in 1790, English statesman Edmund Burke wrote that the French Revolution was, "the most astonishing that has hitherto happened to the world." The gothic novel was therefore a way for English writers to come to terms with what they considered to be wonderful and as