The Mysteries of Udolpho novel "The Romance of the Forest", plays a prominent role in Jane Austen's novel "Northanger Abbey", in which an impressionable young woman, after reading Radcliffe's novel, comes to see her friends and acquaintances as Gothic villains and victims with amusing results. "The Mysteries of Udolpho" is a quintessential Gothic romance, replete with incidents of physical and psychological terror; remote, crumbling castles; seemingly supernatural events; a brooding, scheming villain; and a persecuted heroine. Modern editors point out that only about one-third of the novel is set in the eponymous Gothic castle, and that the tone and style vary markedly between sections
Northanger Abbey Irvine also notes that the first chapters in the novel satirize the novels of Maria Edgeworth and Frances Burney, whom the novel ostensibly praises, as it does the Gothic novels. An early sign that Henry Tilney is the hero while John Thorpe is not can be seen in the former's liking to read books while the latter does not. The story begins with the narrator remarking that the heroine is not really a heroine, with the narrator saying Catherine was not especially clever, nor a great beauty, and good without being virtuous. The narrator goes to say the reader was