My target is Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest, published in 1791, which narrates a spectacular triple dream, placed as the climax of Volume One of the original three-decker, whose rhetorical structure and textual function will be addressed here, together with its creation of a teleology of the female self at the levels of both protagonist and writer. But before doing so, I need to make a few opening remarks about the development of the romance plot in the Gothic tradition prior to The Romance of the Forest and its characteristic dependence on something which I am calling ‘providential thinking’, a particular mode of rhetoric present in the Gothic romance, which we might summarize as a form of retrospective prophecy or narrative prolepsis. This corresponds to the ancient, loose and – increasingly after the mid-eighteenth century – superstitious doctrine of Providence in the Christian tradition which justifies optimism in the future by identifying an underlying current, a thread that is an experience of organization, in the random experiences of the past. Of course, only the Deity can have a proper view of the workings of Providence, because it is essentially His plan for the virtuous and the faithful. Here is the eighteenthcentury Methodist, James Hervey, explaining to his parishioners a passage from the Old Testament, First Book of Kings, chapter 22, verses 33–34:

The footprint of Providence is therefore hard to discern, and it demands a particular kind of trained vigilance from a reader of signs; all randomness needs to be scrutinized for its patterns, because even chance conceals the hidden thread of Providence in a kind of irony of fate, which I shall call, as a shorthand, providential irony.