Published in 1799, Mary Alcock's parodic recipe for novel-writing repeats much-echoed commonplace assumptions about the comparative youth, fair complexion, victimisation, nervous constitution and tendency to flight that characterised the Gothic heroine of the 1790s. In playful tone, Alcock's recipe endows the heroine with the superhuman abilities of scaling walls and fleeing tyranny, underlining at the same time the unrealistic expectations that author and reader project onto a heroine. Still, despite the humorous vein, there is something disturbing about the way in which her poem conflates the role of Gothic authorship with the fictional role of villain. The imagined addressee of this poem (‘you’) holds the heroine captive, like the villain, subjects her to a carriage crash, kidnap, imprisonment and perpetual flight. It is an astute conflation on the part of Alcock, suggesting that any female author's exploitation of a heroine involves, in turn, an abrogation of femininity on their part. In other words, exploiting a heroine for commercial gain is a masculine pursuit, unsuitable for proper women writers.

Of course, Alcock did this in the spirit of parody, in order to distance herself critically from the commercial exploitation of the Gothic heroine. Her recipe was one in a long line of parodies that targeted the unimaginative regurgitation of a heroine as virtuous and blue-eyed. ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’ (Anon. 1798), ‘The Terrorist System of Novel Writing’ (Anon. 1797) and Alcock's ‘Recipe’ all reproduced the stable set of ingredients for composing a Gothic novel, implying that if any author or reader was naïve enough to devour these recipes, then they must already be lacking in imagination and enterprise.