If you ask a reader of modern Gothic novels to describe the heroine, you are liable to get an impossible portrait: the Gothic heroine is passive, weak and virginal, but simultaneously, or under another name and in another novel, she is passionate, strong and independent. How do these apparently paradoxical types function in the Gothic formula? In the former type of plot someone else - usually the hero - wins; in the latter type she loses. These types can be seen clearly in four novels: Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847), Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1938), Victoria Holt's Kirkland Revels (1962) and Claudette Nicole's House at Hawk's End (1971). (257)