Miss Austen’s novel is something more than a mock-romance, and Catherine is not a mere negative of the traditional heroine, but a human and attractive girl, whose fortunes we follow with the deepest interest.  At the close, after Catherine’s ignominious journey home, we are back again in the cool world of reality.  The abbey is abandoned, after it has served its purpose in disciplining the heroine, in favour of the unromantic country parsonage.

In Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen had deftly turned the novels of Mrs. Radcliffe to comedy; but, even if her parody had been published in 1798, when we are assured that it was completed, her satirical treatment was too quiet and subtle, too delicately mischievous, to have disturbed seriously the popularity of the novel of terror.  We can imagine the Isabella Thorpes and Lydia Bennets of the day dismissing Northanger Abbey with a yawn as “an amazing dull book,” and returning with renewed zest to more stimulating and “horrid” stories.  Maria Edgeworth too had aimed her shaft at the sentimental heroine in one of her Moral Tales—­Angelina or L’Amie Inconnue (1801).  Miss Sarah Green, in Romance Readers and Romance Writers (1810) had displayed the extravagant folly of a clergyman’s daughter whose head was turned by romances.  Ridicule of a more blatant and boisterous kind was needed, and this was supplied by Eaton Stannard Barrett, who, in 1813—­five years before Northanger Abbey appeared—­published The Heroine or The Adventures of Cherubina.  In this farcical romance it is clearly Barrett’s intention to make so vigorous an onslaught that “the Selinas, Evelinas, and Malvinas who faint and blush and weep through four half-bound octavos” shall be, like Catherine Morland, “humbled to the dust.”  Sometimes, indeed, his farce verges on brutality.  To expose the follies of Cherubina it was hardly necessary to thrust her good-humoured father into a madhouse, and this grim incident sounds an incongruous, jarring note in a rollicking high-spirited farce.  The plights into which Cherubina is plunged are so needlessly cruel, that, while only intending to make her ridiculous, Barrett succeeds rather in making her pitiable.  But many of her adventures are only a shade more absurd than those in the romances at which he tilts.  Regina Maria Roche’s Children of the Abbey (1798) would take the wind from the sails of any parodist.  In protracting The Heroine almost to wearisome length, Barrett probably acted deliberately in mimicry of this and a horde of other tedious romances.  Certainly the unfortunate Stuart waits no longer for the fulfilment of his hopes than Lord Mortimer, the long-suffering hero of The Children of the Abbey, who early in the first volume demands of Amanda Fitzalan, what he calls an “eclaircissement,” but does not win it until the close of the fourth.  Barrett does not scruple to mention the titles of the books he derides.  The following catalogue will