Ann Radcliffe

English novelist and poet

• Born: July 9, 1764
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: February 7, 1823
• Place of death: London, England

The most popular and imitated novelist in England at the end of the eighteenth century, Radcliffe almost single-handedly created the style of the female gothic, which explores the problems and anxieties resulting from women’s dependence and isolation. Not only did the female gothic achieve mythical status as a metaphor for female experience but Radcliffe’s works also contributed to the rise of the gothic novel’s popularity.

Early Life

Ann Radcliffe, a mother of the English novel, was the only child of William and Ann Ward, who was thirty-eight years old at the time of her daughter’s birth. Although William Ward, some eleven years younger than his wife, was a tradesman, the family was well connected. When Ann was age seven or eight, the Wards moved to Bath, where William Ward managed a branch of Wedgwood and Bentley.

Ann, who received a good, though not classical, education, was brought up in the Established Church. In 1787, Ann married William Radcliffe, an Oxford graduate, who trained as a lawyer at the Inner Temple. After several terms at one of the inns of court, he became editor and proprietor of a newspaper, The English Chronicle. The young couple, who would remain childless, moved to London, where William had been born and raised. In London, Ann led an uneventful, retired life, insisting on seclusion and privacy.

It was not until after her marriage at the age of twenty-three that Radcliffe began writing. Even as her popularity soared and she became a cultural icon, Radcliffe withdrew from society. Formal, reserved, and shy, the Garboesque writer became increasingly reticent about authorship.

Life’s Work

Six of Ann Radcliffe’s works appeared in her lifetime, with amazing speed in the eight years from 1789 to 1797. A seventh novel, Gaston de Blondeville, was published posthumously in 1826. Starting when she was just twenty-five years old, Radcliffe published her first three novels in three years. Criticized for childishness and historical inaccuracies, Radcliffe’s anonymous first work, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), received little notice. Her second novel, A Sicilian Romance, which was published the following year, was also practically ignored.

Radcliffe’s next novel, The Romance of the Forest (1791), was so widely praised that it established her reputation, but The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian: Or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797) made her wildly famous. In these works Radcliffe developed the female gothic by explaining the supernatural and providing it with banal causality. Unlike classic gothic novelists, who explain little in an attempt to make the reader believe that the mysteries are real, Radcliffe dramatizes the struggle between irrationality and reason. Over and over, she demonstrates that apparently supernatural mysteries are caused by human agency. Radcliffe’s mundane explanations of mysteries have the effect of convincing the reader to guard against indulging in the imagination. In this way Radcliffe’s female gothic is critical of classic gothic exaggerations.

Radcliffe transformed the emotional extravagances of the classic (male) gothic novel, which is usually set in haunted castles, graveyards, ruins, or wild landscapes that create brooding, eerie atmospheres. This form inspires fear by emphasizing the supernatural and the macabre. Although Radcliffe’s exuberant novels are replete with similar fantastic details, she uses them to create a female gothic in which her heroines demonstrate their inner strength in the face of persecution when they separate from home, confront conflicts in confinement, thwart male domination, and resolve ambivalent feelings about their mothers.

Another hallmark of Radcliffe’s female gothic is her innovative, highly poetical descriptions of landscapes, which have spiritual dimensions. Detailed in prose that approaches poetry, Radcliffe’s striking scenery not only reflects and enhances the plot but also defines and summarizes character, evoking elevated emotions. Picturesque scenes are related to characters’ emotional and moral awareness: Only sensitive, virtuous characters experience heightened, transcendent reactions to nature. It is, however, this same extreme sensibility that can exaggerate the terror of their situations.

Remarkably, Radcliffe’s novels set in Italy (A Sicilian Romance, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and The Italian) depict places she had never visited. If the Radcliffes frequently traveled around England, a single trip to Holland, western Germany, and the Rhine (recorded in Radcliffe’s Journey Made in the Summer of 1794) represents the only time she ever went abroad. The vivid descriptions in her Italian novels were influenced by travel literature and by paintings. Her romantic landscapes dramatize Edmund Burke’s concept of the sublime, which is inspired by such sources as obscurity, privation, vastness, infinity, difficulty, and magnificence. In this aesthetic model of dominance and submission, the soul experiences transcendence by feeling its own power confronting the unimaginable.

Radcliffe’s extreme focus on the energy of the sublime scene and atmosphere to excite fear leaves her characters indiscriminate and one-dimensional. Full of sensibility, Radcliffe’s feminized heroes are weak and ineffectual. Her villains, however, are arresting. Her most fully elaborated character, the satanically flamboyant Schedoni in The Italian, is magnificent in his mysterious solitude.

With virtue that is beyond reproach, Radcliffe’s female victims are conventionally beautiful, prone to tears, and sensitive to landscape. Yet they are unlike the heroines of Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, or Jane Austen, who all seek moral guidance from male figures. Instead, Radcliffe’s female gothic requires her heroines to maintain their independence in romantic relationships. In the end, most are not rescued by their heroes.

The female gothic not only reflects the patriarchal violence of the classic gothic but also stresses female kinship relations. In fact, so important is the mother-daughter bond in her work that is has been described as “matrophobic” gothic, which focuses on the mother’s threat to engulf her child and the daughter’s issues of identification and separation. At the dramatic heart of the Radcliffean female or matrophobic gothic is the daughter’s conflict with maternal figures from whom she cannot totally separate because of her own femaleness and because the figures symbolize the daughter’s own fate.

After achieving her greatest success with The Italian at the age of thirty-four, Radcliffe stopped writing for publication. Mysteriously, she published no new novels in the twenty-six years that remained of her life. She spent most of this time secluded at home or traveling around England. A trip to Kenilworth Castle in 1802 inspired the posthumously published Gaston de Blondeville, which may have been written collaboratively with her husband in 1802 or 1803. Although The Italian had received great acclaim, Radcliffe declined to publish Gaston de Blondeville (her only classic gothic) during her lifetime. Many assumed that Radcliffe had died or gone insane. Even though she had wide access to the press, so self-effacing was Radcliffe that she never corrected such rumors.

If not because of madness, why did she stop publishing? For one thing, she probably did not need the money. By 1800, after the death of her parents, her inheritance, together with the considerable profits from her novels, left her in comfortable circumstances. Another reason may have been that she was deeply offended by the criticism, along with parodies and inferior imitations, of her work—even though she must have derived pleasure from appreciations of her work by some of her most famous contemporaries. In addition, she may have been too debilitated to write, at least during her last twelve years, when she suffered from the respiratory and digestive problems that would finally lead to her death in 1823.

Significance

Ann Radcliffe’s works ushered in a gothic craze, most evident from 1789 to 1815, when she emerged as the most popular novelist in Great Britain. Her electrifying female gothic helped to found and sustain a vogue for the picturesque, sentimental, and sublime thriller. She is commonly praised for her use of the unconscious, her evocation of fear and suspense, and her innovative poetic descriptions of architecture and landscape. Her work inspired not only plays, operas, and imitations but also influenced, profoundly, Romantic and Victorian literature; detective, psychological, and horror genres; and a whole host of individual authors including Jane Austen, Charles Robert Maturin, Matthew Gregory Lewis, William Hazlitt, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, the Shelleys, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Brontës, William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe.

Highly praised in her own day—but devalued and mocked as she came to be virtually excluded from the canon—Radcliffe is being approached with new seriousness because of the efforts of feminist revisionist literary critics, who are reclaiming the female tradition in literature. Deservingly, Radcliffe is also at the center of renewed interest in the gothic genre, after establishing the major characteristics of the female gothic novel.

Bibliography

Bohls, Elizabeth. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716-1818. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. A scholarly work that traces the experiences of eighteenth and early nineteenth century women travelers. The journals, letters, travelogues, position papers, and novels of Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Wortley Montagu, and Mary Shelley are explored to show how women actively participated in travel and exploration and in documenting their experiences.

Norton, Rictor. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. New York: Leicester University Press, 1999. Despite Norton’s flamboyant tendency to equate Radcliffe with her characters, this biography focuses on cultural history to introduce important new ideas.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. Gothic Readings: The First Wave, 1764-1840. New York: Leicester University Press, 2000. Norton presents selections of gothic literature in the period that includes Radcliffe, along with contemporary criticism and reader responses. A good text for readers new to gothic literature.

Rogers, Deborah D. Ann Radcliffe: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Uses updated manuscript material to construct Radcliffe’s life. The comprehensive annotated bibliography includes editions, translations, and criticism from 1789 to 1995.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. The Critical Response to Ann Radcliffe. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Includes almost one hundred critiques of Radcliffe’s work, from the last quarter of the eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century.