The Mysteries of Udolpho

An orphaned girl is carried off to a half-ruined castle in the Apennines by the man who has married her aunt for her estates, and every terror she meets is eventually explained. Radcliffe was the best-paid novelist of the 1790s and wrote about Italy without ever going there. Austen built Northanger Abbey out of readers who took this book too seriously. Ninety-eight plates, from Claude Lorrain to Canaletto, follow the same road the heroine takes: pastoral country, fortresses and castles standing over the landscapes of her flight.