Catherine connects what she observes in the General and what she has heard from Eleanor about Mrs. Tilney’s death to the plot of
The Mysteries of Udolpho. In that Gothic novel, the villain Montoni keeps the heroine’s aunt locked up in a room until this causes her death. In yet another Gothic novel,
A Sicilian Romance, children find that their mother has been kept prisoner in their father’s castle. Catherine does not know for a fact that Henry and Frederick were also away during Mrs. Tilney’s illness, but in her eagerness to piece together a terrifying suspicion worth investigating, she assumes that they were. Gothic heroines usually stay up until midnight to begin their investigations, but Catherine fails to imitate this, as the narrator again undercuts clichés of exciting tales with mundane reality.