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 a portion of the novel's last sentence for the epigraph to Chapter 50 in his "Watership Down"; the reference to the General is felicitous, as the villain in "Watership Down" is also a General. The book, also, contains an early historical reference to baseball. It is found in the first chapter of the novel, describing the interest of the heroine : "...Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, baseball, riding on horseback, and running about the country...". It is not the earliest reference to the term, which is presently believed to be in a 1744