Sheridan’s Lydia Languish (1775) and Colman’s Polly Honeycombe (1777) were both demoralised by the follies of sentimental fiction, as Biddy Tipkin, in Steele’s Tender Husband (1705), had been by romances.  It was Miss Austen’s purpose in creating Catherine Morland to present a maiden bemused by Gothic romance: 

“No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be a heroine.”  In almost every detail she is a refreshing contrast to the traditional type.  Two long-lived conventions—­the fragile mother, who dies at the heroine’s birth, and the tyrannical father—­are repudiated at the very outset; and Catherine is one of a family of seven.  We cannot conceive that Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroines even at the age of ten would “love nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house.”  Her accomplishments lack the brilliance and distinction of those of Adela and Julia, but,

“Though she could not write sonnets she brought herself to read them; and though there seemed no chance of her throwing a whole party into raptures by a prelude on the pianoforte, she could listen to other people’s performances with very little fatigue.  Her greatest deficiency was in the pencil—­she had no notion of drawing, not enough even to attempt a sketch of her lover’s profile, that she might be detected in the design.  There she fell miserably short of the true heroic height...Not one started with rapturous wonder on beholding her...nor was she once called a divinity by anybody.”

She had no lover at the age of seventeen,

“because there was not a lord in the neighbourhood—­not even a baronet.  There was not one family among their acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy accidentally found at their door—­not one whose origin was unknown.”

Nor is Catherine aided in her career by those “improbable events,” so dear to romance, that serve to introduce a hero—­a robber’s attack, a tempest, or a carriage accident.  With a sly glance at such dangerous characters as Lady Greystock in The Children of the Abbey (1798), Miss Austen creates the inert, but good-natured Mrs. Alien as Catherine’s chaperone in Bath: 

“It is now expedient to give some description of Mrs. Alien that the reader may be able to judge in what manner her actions will hereafter tend to promote the general distress of the work and how she will probably contribute to reduce poor Catherine to all the desperate wretchedness of which a last volume is capable, whether by her imprudence, vulgarity or jealousy—­whether by intercepting her letters, ruining her character or turning her out of doors.”

Amid all the diversions of the gay and beautiful city of Bath, Miss Austen does not lose sight entirely of her satirical aim, though she turns aside for a time.  Catherine’s confusion of mind is suggested with exquisite art in a single sentence.