The Romance of the Forest evokes a world drenched in both horror and natural splendor, beset with abductions and imprisonments, and centered upon the frequently terrified but still resourceful and determined heroine Adeline. The Gothic Romance stands perfectly poised between the eighteenth century and the oncoming Age of Romanticism, offering moral lessons, pure thrills, and a new kind of fiction with more prominence given to atmospheric setting and sustained suspense than ever before.