Burney's "Evelina," and the novels of Jane Porter and Mrs. Opie.
Thackeray said that there was more crying in "Thaddeus of Warsaw" than in
any novel he ever remembered to have read.[21] Emily, in the "Mysteries
of Udolpho" cannot see the moon, or hear a guitar or an organ or the
murmur of the pines, without weeping. Every page is bedewed with the
tear of sensibility; the whole volume is damp with it, and ever and anon
a chorus of sobs goes up from the entire company. Mrs. Radcliffe's
heroines are all descendents of Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe, but under
more romantic circumstances. They are beset with a thousand
difficulties; carried off by masked ruffians, immured in convents, held
captive in robber castles, encompassed with horrors natural and
supernatural, persecuted, threatened with murder and with rape. But
though perpetually sighing, blushing, trembling, weeping, fainting, they
have at bottom a kind of toughness that endures through all. They rebuke
the wicked in stately language, full of noble sentiments and moral
truths. They preserve the most delicate feelings of propriety in
situations the most discouraging. Emily, imprisoned in the gloomy castle
of Udolpho, in the power of ruffians whose brawls and orgies fill night
and day with horror, in hourly fear for her virtue and her life, sends
for the lord of the castle,--whom she believes to have murdered her
aunt,--and reminds him that, as her protectress is now dead, it would not
be proper for her to stay any longer under his roof thus unchaperoned,
and will he please, therefore, send her home?

Mrs. Radcliffe's fictions are romantic, but not usually mediaeval in
subject. In the "Mysteries of Udolpho," the period of the action is the
end of the sixteenth century; in the "Romance of the Forest," 1658; in
"The Italian," about 1760. But her machinery is prevailingly Gothic and
the real hero of the story is commonly, as in Walpole, some haunted
building. In the "Mysteries of Udolpho" it is a castle in the Apennines;