Guy Mannering (1815), emphasizes "human affections". In 1835, she wrote a Gothic novel for adolescents entitled Shanty the Blacksmith, which Cutt calls "a gripping [and] exciting tale" and employs the tropes of the genre: "lost heir, ruined castle, humble helpers and faithful retainer, sinister and mysterious gypsies, prisoner and plot". In 1835, Sherwood published the novel Caroline Mordaunt, about a young woman forced to become a governess. Her parents die when she is young, but luckily relatives pay to educate her, so she can earn her own living. It follows her progress from a flighty, discontented girl to a reliable, content woman; she learns to accommodate herself to the whims of a proud nobility, silly literati, and dogmatic evangelicals. She realizes that in her dependent position she must be content with less than complete happiness. Once she recognizes this, though, she finds God, and in the last chapter an ideal husband, so granting her near-complete happiness after all. Cutt suggests that in these works, Sherwood drew on Jane Austen and Jane Taylor for a new "lively, humorous, and satirical strain". In both later works such as Caroline Mordaunt and her earlier evangelical texts, Sherwood followed the Victorian project of prescribing gender roles; while her later works outlined ever more stringent and narrow roles for each sex, her early works such as The Fairchild Family suggested demarcations as well: Lucy and Emily learn to sew and keep house while Henry tends the garden and learns Latin. Legacy As Britain's education system became more secular in the later nineteenth century, Sherwood's evangelical books were used mainly to teach the poor and in Sunday schools. Her missionary stories were the most influential of all her works, for according to Cutt, they "kept alive the missionary spirit and perpetuated that paternal attitude towards India that lasted into the [twentieth century], were widely imitated" and "an unfortunate assumption of racial superiority was fostered by the over-simplification of some of Mrs. Sherwood's successors". They influenced Charlotte Maria Tucker ("A.L.O.E.") and even perhaps Rudyard Kipling. In the United States, Sherwood's early works were popular and republished well into the 1840s; thereafter a tradition of specifically American children's literature began to develop with authors such as Louisa May Alcott. Sherwood was also instrumental in developing the ideology of the Victorian family. Cutt acknowledges that "the omniscient Victorian parent was not the creation of Mrs. Sherwood, but of the