SOURCE: "Fathers and Daughters: Ann Radcliffe," in Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels, The University of Chicago Press, 1990, pp. 147-74.

In the following excerpt, Spacks argues that Radcliffe bases the structure of her fiction on the "moral implications of [Edmund Burke's theory of the sublime."]

In Radcliffe's novels . . . literal or metaphoric tensions between fathers and daughters suggest a way to understand the new kind of plot that [Fanny Burney's] Evelina introduced. Radcliffe's plots might be called "daughters' plots"—not simply because they originate in a female consciousness, but because they establish internal principles of action by giving due weight to the psychology and morality traditionally associated with daughters as well as to the assumptions of sons.

In an interesting comment on the subversive potential of the Gothic novel, Robert Kiely observes the form's early concentration on domestic disruption.

The Gothic novel did eventually encourage...