Understanding the context

Dr. Frankenstein is a medical doctor, who decides to create life in a dead body by using electricity (a fairly new phenomenon i 1818!). He sews together a dead body by using body parts from different dead bodies he digs up. This creature (called "Frankenstein's monster") then comes to life, only to be despised and feared by society. The monster - being lonely and unhappy - wants Frankenstein to make him a female companion. In this extract, Dr. Frankenstein is about to do this.

Ann. Radcliffe: the romance of the forest

Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) published five novels between 1789 and 1797, all tremendously popular in their day and influential on other writers for long afterward. Their plots have been efficiently summarized by Russell Noyes in an introduction of 1956:

The hero is a gentleman of noble birth, likely as not in some sort of disgrace; the heroine, an orphan-heiress, high-strung and sensitive, and highly susceptible to music and poetry and to nature in its most romantic moods. A prominent role is given to the tyrant-villain. He is a man of fierce and morose passions obsessed by the love of power and riches. The villain can usually be counted on to confine the heroine in the haunted wing of a castle because she refuses to marry someone she hates. Whatever the details, Mrs. Radcliffe generally manages the plot and action so that the chief impression is a sense of the young heroine's incessant danger. On oft-repeated midnight prowls about the gloomy passageways of a rambling, ruined castle, the heroine in a quiver of excitement (largely self-induced) experiences a series of hair-raising adventures and narrow escapes. Her emotional tension is kept to the pitch by a succession of strange sights and sounds . . . and by an assorted array of sliding panels, trap doors, faded hangings, veiled portraits, bloodstained garments, and even dark and desperate characters.

Radcliffe published her third novel, The Romance of the Forest, in 1791. The extract here, from chapter 8, is of particular interest because Jane Austen recalled specific details from it when she was writing the fifth chapter of volume 2 of Northanger Abbey. The passage has been associated with Austen ever since R. W. Chapman included it in an appendix to his Oxford text of Northanger Abbey in The Novels of Jane Austen (1923).

(from the Norton Anthology of English Literature online)