Landscape has a talismanic importance in Ann Radcliffe's novels. Not only can one judge the character of people by the style of their estates or by their responses to natural scenery, but one also finds parallels such as those in the first meeting of Emily St. Aubert and Valancourt, “whose ideas were simple and grand, like the landscapes among which they moved” (MU, 49). Characters often seem nothing but reflections of those landscapes, over which their various psychological states may be displayed on a larger scale. They journey across this background as through the fears, limitations, contradictions, and desires of the cultural topography in which Radcliffe wrote her novels. Landscape comes to appear as the central character of her novels, or her individual characters as fragments of a general human nature that cannot be fully revealed unless one makes a tour of the variety of nature, discovering character through cartography. In fact, this parallel between landscape and character may become so close that at times Radcliffe's characters themselves experience difficulty in distinguishing between them.