Meanwhile, real dangers do threaten Catherine. Dangers she is utterly unaware of and unprepared for. When it all blows up, she cannot even begin to imagine why.
This, strange as this might seem, is a huge moment. This is the foundation of the rest of Austen's fiction. Take a book like Udolpho and take out the elements that Henry says cannot take place in modern England and you have the basis for a different kind of story. You'd have to rethink motives and relations somewhat but you wouldn't have to rethink them completely. Fantasy fiction starts by exempting itself from some rules but it cannot exempt itself from all rules and good fantasy stories must pay heed to non-fantastic motives and relations. Strip the castle out of Udolpho and you have a story about an orphaned girl at the hands of relatives. And this, in turn, is an almost universal story because most of us leave a home where everyone loves us to go out into a world where people's motives are neither transparent nor consistent.
At heart of Radcliffe's fiction are story elements that Jane Austen will use for the rest of her career. If I remember, I'll come back to this when I get to Pride and Prejudice because there is an interesting relationship between it and Radcliffe's The Italian. And again, in Mansfield Park we will see how Austen uses elements from stories about virgin martyrs to shape a new story about Fanny Price.
My point is, that is what she does from now on. Austen looks at certain grand narrative forms and rewrites these stories in terms of the beautiful, feminine, intimate details that other writing has tended to leave out. With Sense and Sensibility, however, she aims much higher. That book doesn't rewrite a Radcliffe story , it rewrites a Shakespeare story.
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