She also wrote some poems and a volume of _Travels_ (1794) which is important for a reason to be noticed presently.

But her fame rests upon four books, which she published in seven years, between her own twenty-sixth and thirty-third, _A Sicilian Romance_ (1790), _The Romance of the Forest_ (1791), the world-renowned _Mysteries of Udolpho_ in 1794-1795, and _The Italian_ two years later.
These stories owed their original attraction to the skill with which, by the use of a Defoe-like minuteness of detail, added to a pictorial faculty which Defoe had not, an atmosphere of terror is constantly diffused and kept up.

Very little that is terrible actually happens: but the artist succeeds (so long as the trick has not become too familiar) in persuading you that something very terrible is _going_ to happen, or has just happened.

And so the delight of something "horrid," as the Catherines and Isabellas of the day put it, is given much more plentifully, and even much more excitingly, than it could be by a real horror now and then, with intervals of miscellaneous business.

In one sense, indeed, the process will not stand even the slightest critical examination: for it is soon seen to consist of a succession of serious mystifications and non-comic much-ados-about-nothing.