Although the Romance of the Forest is considerably shorter than the later novels, the plot, which is full of ingenious complications, is unfolded in the most leisurely fashion.  Mrs. Radcliffe’s tantalising delays quicken our curiosity as effectively as the deliberate calm of a raconteur, who, with a view to heightening his artistic effect, pauses to light a pipe at the very climax of his story.  Suspense is the key-note of the romance.  The characters are still subordinate to incident, but La Motte and his wife claim our interest because they are exhibited in varying moods.  La Motte has his struggles and, like Macbeth, is haunted by compunctious visitings of nature.  Unlike the thorough-paced villain, who glories in his misdeeds, he is worried and harassed, and takes no pleasure in his crimes.  Madame La Motte is not a jealous woman from beginning to end like the marchioness in the Sicilian Romance.  Her character is moulded to some extent by environment.  She changes distinctly in her attitude to Adeline after she has reason to suspect her husband.  Mrs. Radcliffe’s psychology is neither subtle nor profound, but the fact that psychology is there in the most rudimentary form is a sign of her progress in the art of fiction.  Theodore is as insipid as the rest of Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroes, who are distinguishable from one another only by their names, and Adeline is perhaps a shade more emotional and passionless than Emily and Ellena in The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian.  The lachrymose maiden in The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, who can assume at need “an air of offended dignity,” is a preliminary sketch of Julia, Emily and Ellena in the later novels.  Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroines resemble nothing more than a composite photograph in which all distinctive traits are merged into an expressionless “type.”  They owe something no doubt to Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe, but their feelings are not so minutely analysed.  Their lady-like accomplishments vary slightly.  In reflective mood one may lightly throw off a sonnet to the sunset or to the nocturnal gale, while another may seek refuge in her water-colours or her lute.  They are all dignified and resolute in the most distressing situations, yet they weep and faint with wearisome frequency.  Their health and spirits are as precarious as their easily extinguished candles.  Yet these exquisitely sensitive, well-bred heroines alienate our sympathy by their impregnable self-esteem, a disconcerting trait which would certainly have exasperated heroes less perfect and more human than Mrs. Radcliffe’s Theodores and Valancourts.  Their sorrows never rise to tragic heights, because they are only passive sufferers, and the sympathy they would win as pathetic figures is obliterated by their unfailing consciousness of their own rectitude.  In describing Adeline, Mrs. Radcliffe attempts an unusually acute analysis: