Maria Edgeworth too had aimed
her shaft at the sentimental heroine in one of her _Moral
Tales--Angelina or L'Amie Inconnue_ (1801). Miss Sarah Green, in
_Romance Readers and Romance Writers_ (1810) had displayed the
extravagant folly of a clergyman's daughter whose head was turned
by romances. Ridicule of a more blatant and boisterous kind was
needed, and this was supplied by Eaton Stannard Barrett, who, in
1813--five years before _Northanger Abbey_ appeared--published
_The Heroine or The Adventures of Cherubina_. In this farcical
romance it is clearly Barrett's intention to make so vigorous an
onslaught that "the Selinas, Evelinas, and Malvinas who faint and
blush and weep through four half-bound octavos" shall be, like
Catherine Morland, "humbled to the dust." Sometimes, indeed, his
farce verges on brutality. To expose the follies of Cherubina it
was hardly necessary to thrust her good-humoured father into a
madhouse, and this grim incident sounds an incongruous, jarring
note in a rollicking high-spirited farce. The plights into which
Cherubina is plunged are so needlessly cruel, that, while only
intending to make her ridiculous, Barrett succeeds rather in
making her pitiable. But many of her adventures are only a shade
more absurd than those in the romances at which he tilts.
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