Benedikte Naubert's important role in the development of the historical novel and the fairy tale as literary genres has been highlighted in recent years; her importance for the formation of gothic fiction, however, has for the most part been either ignored or denied. One reason for this reticence seems to be a fear among scholars of an almost automatic association of the gothic with what Germans pejoratively term “trivial” literature and the concomitant debasement of Naubert as a leading female writer of the eighteenth century that such an association incurs. In contrast, the proximity of her texts to the so-called Ritter-, Räuberund Schauerromane (novels of chivalry, banditry, and horror) in terms of motifs and form has been noted both by Naubert's own contemporaries and latter-day scholars alike, albeit without analyzing these connections in any great depth. Peter Haining referred to Naubert as “Germany's most prolific female Gothic novelist … dubbed by at least one authority as ‘Europe's Mrs. Radcliffe.’” For Victoria Scheibler, Naubert was a “Wegbereiter … des aufkommenden Genres der Schauerliteratur” (laid the ground for the new genre of the gothic novel), and Robert Ignatius Le Tellier has posited Friedrich Schiller's Geisterseher (The Ghost-Seer) and Naubert's Hermann von Unna as the dual origins of the German gothic novel.

The motif of the secret society that features prominently in these novels is a potent paradigm for anxieties relating to the French Revolution, but also to the perceived obscure nature of increasingly complex political and economic structures and networks exemplified in secret societies such as the Illuminati.