man she thinks of as a possible husband in the novel, but this is not the case in Emmeline. Emmeline marries Godolphin, a character who does not appear until half-way through the narrative. Some readers felt that this was dangerous, since it suggested that the ideal woman would have a romantic past. Smith also rewrites earlier scenes from best-selling novels, offering her own interpretation of them. For example, “Delamere's half-tricking, half-forcing Emmeline into a waiting coach” mirrors a scene from Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48). However, unlike Richardson's tale, Smith's does not end tragically but rather with Delamere succumbing to Emmeline's wishes and returning her safe to her home. Cinderella story The structure of Emmeline follows the Cinderella pattern: the poor, social outcast becomes rich and socially acceptable. This easy plot resolution, which was expected by readers at the time, was unconvincing to some, such as novelist Walter Scott; others have argued that the ending was meant to feel false and thus force readers to attend to the injustices outlined earlier in the novel. Gothic novel The castle is a metaphor for Emmeline's body: Delamere wants to possess both. When he first encounters Emmeline, he attempts to rape her, breaking into her room. She escapes through the winding staircases of the Gothic castle, mimicking a scene in Horace Walpole's Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto (1764). Darker elements of the Gothic appear in the Adelina plot line, as she descends into madness and fears violence from those surrounding her. Style Smith's novels were praised for their descriptions of landscapes, a technique new to the novel in the late eighteenth century. In Emmeline, the heroine's identity is formed by her encounters with nature, necessitating intricate descriptions of the heroine's mind and surrounding nature. Smith's descriptions were particularly literary, drawing on Thomas Gray's Memoirs of the Life and Writing of Mr. Gray (1775), William Gilpin's Observations on the River Wye (1782), and Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). For example, Emmeline observes that the storm she sees from the Isle of Wight, has "grandeur [which] gratified her taste for the sublime", indicating a Burkean view of nature. In the scene, Godolphin, a naval officer, assumes authority and rescues a foundering party. Burke had associated the sublime with masculinity and the beautiful with femininity; Smith follows him here and indicates to the reader,