Ann Radcliffe

Ann Radcliffe (born July 9, 1764, London, England—died February 7, 1823, London) was the most representative of English Gothic novelists. She was a pioneer in developing a literature of terror, and her influential novels stand apart in their ability to infuse scenes of terror and suspense with Romantic sensibility.

Ann Ward’s father was in trade, and the family lived in well-to-do gentility. In 1787, at the age of 23, she married William Radcliffe, a journalist who encouraged her literary pursuits. Ann Radcliffe led a retired life and never visited the countries where the fearful happenings in her novels took place. Her only journey abroad, to Holland and Germany, was made in 1794 after most of her books were written. The journey was described in her A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 (1795).

Her first novels, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) and A Sicilian Romance (1790), were published anonymously. She achieved fame with her third novel, The Romance of the Forest (1791), a tale of 17th-century France. Her next work, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), made her the most popular novelist in England. This novel tells how the orphaned Emily St. Aubert is subjected to cruelties by guardians, threatened with the loss of her fortune, and imprisoned in castles but is finally freed and united with her lover. Strange and fearful events take place in the haunted atmosphere of the solitary castle of Udolpho, set high in the dark and majestic Apennines.

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With The Italian (1797), Radcliffe realized her full stature as a writer. The novel’s dialogue and plot construction are adept, and its villain, Schedoni, a monk of massive physique and sinister disposition, is treated with psychological insight. She made considerable sums of money from The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, selling the copyright of the former for £500 and that of the latter for £800. Radcliffe published no more fiction in her lifetime; it seems likely that she ceased to write novels as soon as it was no longer financially necessary to do so. She was notoriously shy about being addressed in person as an author.

In the last 20 years of her life Radcliffe wrote mostly poetry. Her poems (1816) and her posthumous novel Gaston de Blondeville (1826), which includes a good deal of verse, were not as well received as her previous work.

Radcliffe was an innovator in the early development of the Gothic novel. She followed the genre’s inventor, Horace Walpole, by about a generation, and her work reflects her important distinction between terror and horror. The former, she wrote, “expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life”; the latter “contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.” She used her tales of terror to generate a feeling of mystery and suspense; seemingly supernatural events would be revealed as natural phenomena after a suitably prolonged period of time. (By contrast, her contemporary Matthew Lewis wrote horror: corpses, violence, and blood.)

Sir Walter Scott credited her with being “among the favoured few, who have been distinguished as the founders of a class, or school,” and her many admirers included Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Christina Rossetti. Adapting the tradition of the novel of sensibility, she focused the themes of nascent Romanticism and exerted an important influence on the Romantic writers who followed.

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