But, in Mrs. Radcliffe's day, common
sense was so tyrannical, that the poor lady's romances would have been
excluded from families, if she had not provided normal explanations of
her groans, moans, voices, lights, and wandering figures. The ghost-hunt
in the castle finally brings Julia to a door, whose bolts, "strengthened
by desperation, she forced back." There was a middle-aged lady in the
room, who, after steadily gazing on Julia, "suddenly exclaimed, 'My
daughter!' and fainted away." Julia being about seventeen, and Madame
Mazzini, her mamma, having been immured for fifteen years, we observe, in
this recognition, the force of the maternal instinct.
The wicked Marquis was poisoned by the partner of his iniquities, who
anon stabbed herself with a poniard. The virtuous Julia marries the
chaste Hippolytus, and, says the author, "in reviewing this story, we
perceive a singular and striking instance of moral retribution."
We also remark the futility of locking up an inconvenient wife, fabled to
be defunct, in one's own country house. Had Mr. Rochester, in "Jane
Eyre," studied the "Sicilian Romance," he would have shunned an obsolete
system, inconvenient at best, and apt, in the long run, to be disastrous.
In the "Romance of the Forest" (1791), Mrs. Radcliffe remained true to
Mr. Stanley Weyman's favourite period, the end of the sixteenth century.
But there are no historical characters or costumes in the story, and all
the persons, as far as language and dress go, might have been alive in
1791.
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