Just months after the publication of Mrs Costello's The Soldier's Orphan in 1809, a reviewer for the Critical Review clearly positions the work as a novel of social etiquette, a safe novel that can be ‘put into the hands of any young lady’. Although offering a far less favourable assessment of the novel, ‘Mrs Bar.’, writing for the Monthly Review, agrees, and concludes that the novel ‘atones in morality for what it wants in interest’. The novel's exploration of contemporary society at all levels, and women's role and limitations within that society, certainly render the novel didactic. Further, Louisa Fitzormond's self-sacrifices, and the piety and grace she demonstrates throughout her trials and humiliations, make her an impeccable exemplar of Christian charity. Yet, Louisa's story is also one stereotypical of Gothic romance, encompassing as it does abduction, incarceration in a lunatic asylum, a despotic evil guardian and hidden secrets.

In her outline of British novels of the Romantic period, Fiona Robertson notes the interrelations between the ‘Gothic’ novel and the novel of moral etiquette: ‘Social convention, male power, female helplessness and uncertainty: the mazes of social propriety in the novel of female etiquette and the physical peril adumbrated in the Gothic often stand in for each other’.