Jane Austen parodied "The Mysteries of Udolpho" in "Northanger Abbey". Radcliffe did not like the direction in which Gothic literature was heading – one of her later novels, "The Italian", was written in response to Matthew Gregory Lewis's "The Monk". Radcliffe portrayed her female characters as equal to male characters, allowing them to dominate and overtake the typically powerful male villains and heroes, creating new roles for women in literature previously not available. After Radcliffe's death, her husband released her unfinished essay "On the Supernatural in Poetry", which details the difference between the sensation of "terror" her works aimed to achieve and the "horror" Lewis sought to evoke. Radcliffe stated that terror aims to stimulate readers through imagination and perceived evils while horror closes them off through fear and physical dangers. "Terror and Horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them."