He went in search of his parentage, with mixed results, but he did end up as king himself. Theseus is another such character, hidden from his true parentage until such time as he was able to lift a gigantic stone and find, wear, and wield his father’s arms and armor. He grew up to later to vanquish this captor and liberate his true family and wider extended family and community. To protect him from mass infanticide, Moses was laid in a basket as a nursing infant, and set in the waters of the Nile to be found and raised up in the court of his people’s captor. These youthful orphans include examples going back as far as the Biblical tale of the Israelite Moses. The protagonist is usually male, of course, given that the storytellers have also usually been male.

The tale of the orphaned hero has been familiar in many literary traditions. Thus, Radcliffe presents readers with a non-magical fairy tale, set in 17 th century locales of her imagination, peopled by stereotypes, but with a hopeful message that a woman can overcome abandonment and friendlessness by means of her looks and her feminine manners to attain marital happiness. The author’s purpose seems to be to show that a woman can get the man of her dreams without having to compromise, despite many misfortunes along the way. The characters are types, almost stock characters, meant to provide opportunities for Radcliffe to demonstrate one or another idea. The landscapes and settings of the book’s actions are, instead, reflections of what mental and spiritual struggles and victories the characters are undergoing, or triggers for some emotional state that the author wishes the characters to experience.

This is because the novel instead reveals, via in its assumptions and apparently trivial details, much about contemporary expectations of women. However, for the modern reader, the setting and even the specifics of each character’s personality are less important. Additionally, Radcliffe’s development of her characters is irritatingly vague for a modern reader.

The romance of the forest