Elizabeth Barrett to Mary Russell Mitford, 8 December 1841: 'I have not read Self formation, -- & [italics]have[end italics] read "Gaston de Blondeville". perhaps you don't know it, but I am, have been .. in all sorts of tenses -- a profound reader of romances. I have read Gaston [...] The fault of Mrs Radcliffe's preceeding works was her want of courage in not following back the instincts of our nature to their possible causes. She made the instinct toward the supernatural too prominent, to deny & belie the thing [...] Can anything be more irritating than the Key to her mysteries [...]? 'Just in proportion to the degree of this disagreeableness, is Gaston better & nobler in [italics]design[end italics]. Inasmuch as the ghost is real, it is excellent, but inasmuch as the book hath three volumes (or two) -- it is naught. It did hang upon me (with all its advantages as a ghost story) with a weight from which her preceeding works are sacred. It quite disappointed me! [...] the whole appeared to me heavy & not impressive -- &, what is strange, not so terrible with its actual marvels, as were the waxen mimicries of the Castle of Otranto.'