The Gothic Romance did not reflect real life, or reveal character, or display humour.  Its aim was different.  It was full of sentimentality, and it stirred the emotions of pity and fear.  The ethereal, sensitive heroine, suffering through no fault of her own, could not fail to win sympathy.  The hero was pale, melancholy, and unfortunate enough to be attractive.  The villain, bold and desperate in his crimes, was secretly admired as well as feared.  Hairbreadth escapes and wicked intrigues in castles built over beetling precipices were sufficiently outside the reader’s own experience to produce a thrill.  Ghosts, and rumours of ghosts, touched nearly the eighteenth century reader, who had often listened, with bated breath, to winter’s tales of spirits seen on Halloween in the churchyard, or white-robed spectres encountered in dark lanes and lonely ruins.  In country houses like those described in Miss Austen’s novels, where life was diversified only by paying calls, dining out, taking gentle exercise or playing round games like “commerce” or “word-making and work-taking,” the Gothic Romances must have proved a welcome source of pleasurable excitement.  Mr. Woodhouse, with his melancholy views on the effects of wedding cake and muffin, would have condemned them, no doubt, as unwholesome; Lady Catherine de Bourgh would have been too impatient to read them; but Lydia Bennet, Elinor Dashwood and Isabella Thorpe must have found in them an inestimable solace.  Their fame was soon overshadowed by that of the Waverley Novels, but they had served their turn in providing an entertaining interlude before the arrival of Sir Walter Scott.  Even at the very height of his vogue, they probably enjoyed a surreptitious popularity, not merely in the servants’ hall, but in the drawing room.  Nineteenth century literature abounds in references to the vogue of this school of fiction.  There were spasmodic attempts at a revival in an anonymous work called Forman (1819), dedicated to Scott, and in Ainsworth’s Rookwood (1834); and terror has never ceased to be used as a motive in fiction.

In Villette, Lucy Snowe, whose nerves Ginevra describes as “real iron and bend leather,” gazes steadily for the space of five minutes at the spectral “nun.”  This episode indicates a change of fashion; for the lady of Gothic romance could not have submitted to the ordeal for five seconds without fainting.  A more robust heroine, who thinks clearly and yet feels strongly, has come into her own.  In Jane Eyre many of the situations are fraught with terror, but it is the power of human passion, transcending the hideous scenes, that grips our imagination.  Terror is used as a means to an end, not as an end in itself.  In Wuthering Heights the windswept Yorkshire moors are the background for elemental feelings.  We no longer “tremble with delicious dread” or “snatch a fearful joy.”  The gloom never lightens.  We live ourselves beneath the shadow of Heathcliff’s awe-inspiring personality, and there is no escape from a terror, which passes almost beyond the bounds of speech.  The Brontes do not trifle with emotion or use supernatural elements to increase the tension.  Theirs are the terrors of actual life.