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These days, any experienced romantic reader would greet each page like a fond landmark on a trip back home. Martha is a typical heroine: shy but proud, quick with the truth but slow to subtlety, attractive in certain lights but no raving beauty. Connan is a worthy offspring of Mr. Rochester, a weary, sardonic fellow who never gets around to explaining the only thing the heroine has to know. Romantic props abound: deliciously enigmatic dreams, shadows in windows, gossiping servants, a horse that throws the child. Even the nomenclature is classic: Alvean, Gillyflower, Celestine.
Next to a naive girl the most important prop is a house. It should be a vast, forbidding domicile replete with walled-in rooms and a name that resounds like the surf it often fronts: Manderley, Mount Mellyn, Castle Crediton.
The literary pros who construct these buildings agree that the hardest problem is getting the girl into the house for a believable reason. The classic way-introducing her as governess—is still not scorned, but it is somewhat dated and overused. Alternatively, she can be a secretary, nurse, an orphaned relation.
After the house, the general setting is vital. Anywhere in Wales or Cornwall will do, and there is choice literary real estate in Scotland and Ireland. The trend, though, is toward more exotic places. Mary Stewart has been to Greece, Austria and Lebanon in search of fresh landscape. Even Victoria Holt, who built her career on familiarity with English history, has packed her bags; her next book will be set in Australia. Phyllis Whitney is just back from Norway with practical advice about scouting locales: "Islands are easy. You do your homework before going and get introductions from people like librarians when you arrive. Cities are harder. In Istanbul, I solved the problem by concentrating on just one mosque, one covered bazaar, one small town up the Bosphorus."
One must not suppose that all these ingredients are conjoined in cold blood. The best genre writers, like Victoria Holt and Phyllis Whitney, identify with their heroines. They also identify with their audience. It is not entirely coincidence, therefore, that like the Bronte sisters many gothic writers are products of a sequestered, lonely childhood with plenty of time for fantasy:
> Mary Stewart, nee Rainbow, 54, is a vicar's daughter from Durham in the rugged northeast of England, who had enough narrative knack by boarding-school age to keep the other girls awake telling stories for hours after lights-out. She is the brisk, jolly image of a faculty wife; her husband is head of the geology department at Edinburgh University. In 1950, having learned she could not have children, she sat down with some foolscap on the table and Wuthering Heights in her head and began writing novels. Says she: "I probably would never have written them if I'd had babies." At her best, her prose moves as fast as Charlotte Bronte's, which is fast indeed.