But her own work, save in some of her short stories, which are pretty perfect, represents the imperfect stage of the development--the stage when the novel is trying for the right methods and struggling to get into the right ways, but has not wholly mastered the one or reached the others.
There are those who would assign what they might call "higher genius," or "rarer gift," or something similar, to her countryman Charles Robert Maturin.

The present writer is not very fond of these measurings together of things incommensurable--these attempts to rank the "light white sea-mew" as superior or inferior to the "sleek black pantheress." It is enough to say that while Miss Edgeworth very deliberately adopted the novel, and even, as we have seen, slightly satirised at least pseudo-romance, Maturin was romantic or nothing.

His life was hardly half hers in length, and his temperament appears to have been as discontented as hers was sunny: but he had his successes in drama as well as in novel, and one of his attempts in the latter kind had a wide-ranging influence abroad as well as at home, has been recently printed both in whole and in part, and undoubtedly ranks among the novels which any tolerably well instructed person would enumerate if he were asked to give a pretty full list of celebrated (and deservedly celebrated) books of the kind in English.

The others fall quite out of comparison.

_The Fatal Revenge_ or the _Family of Montorio_ (1807) is a try for the "furthest" in the Radcliffe-Lewis direction, discarding indeed the crudity of _The Monk_, but altogether neglecting the restraint of _Udolpho_ and its companions in the use of the supernatural.