The woman-in-peril novel dates back to the rise of the Gothic romance at the end of the eighteenth century. In the typical Gothic tale, a young woman is trapped in an isolated country house or abandoned monastery and menaced by a fiend bent on her sexual destruction.

The romances rely on exotic, often historical, locations dripping with period trappings and surrounded by a general atmosphere of decay. The suspense in the early romance novels was protracted, as was the prose, and they generally appealed to a middle- to upper-middle-class reading public, largely female, who had plenty of free time for reading long works of fiction.

While the genre had wide appeal, it was not without its critics, who found the Gothic atmosphere often comically excessive. Jane Austin's Northanger Abbey is perhaps one of the better known of the parodies of the form written during the time...