The Mysteries of Udolpho presented Jane Austen with an irresistible target for parody. Beneath its cheerful sarcasm, however, Northanger Abbey pays a darkly ambiguous tribute to Radcliffe's grasp of the cultural politics of gender in late eighteenth-century Britain. Despite her wry disclaimer, Austen shows Radcliffe's fiction to be (taking a phrase from Patricia Spacks) “both profoundly realistic — that is, its plots speak the realities of the culture from which they emerge — and consistently daring in its exploration of formal, psychological, and social possibility.” Northanger Abbey responds to Radcliffe's treatment of the difficult issue with which all these women writers struggled: women's relation to knowledge as cultural power. Like women travel writers from Mary Wortley Montagu to Dorothy Wordsworth, Radcliffe chose to engage specifically with one body of knowledge, the fashionable language of aesthetics — the language Austen's Henry Tilney teaches to Catherine Morland in a scene that captures women's derivative and conflicted relation to the powerful discourses of the dominant culture.

Radcliffe certainly earned Samuel Holt Monk's epithet, “the landscape novelist of all time.” Her protagonists are not just persecuted Gothic heroines but, first of all, scenic tourists.