Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Ann Radcliffe
-
Standard Name: Radcliffe, Ann
Birth Name: Ann Ward
Married Name: Ann Radcliffe
Pseudonym: The Author of A Sicilian Romance
Pseudonym: Adeline
AR
is well known as the mistress par excellence of eighteenth-century Gothic fiction, the continuing tradition of which she strongly marked with the characteristics of her individual style. She also produced poetry, travel writing, and criticism. She apparently wrote for her own enjoyment, not because she needed the money, and after five novels in seven years she stopped publishing. She held aloof from the company of other literary people, and kept her private life from the public eye.
Charles Burney
, too, slighted his youngest daughter's work in comparison with the elder's.
Burney, Sarah Harriet. “Editor’s Introduction”. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, edited by Lorna J. Clark, Georgia University Press.
lxii
Jane Austen
later noted that Clarentine seemed good on the first reading, not so good on the second, and unnatural...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Hervey
The Critical Review once again praised the style and characters. It judged the novel too long and its plot too complicated, but that the whole was certainly superior to the majority of flimsy publications of...
Literary responses
Anna Maria Mackenzie
The Critical Review was unimpressed, classifying this as an inadequate imitation of Radcliffe
, incorporating the apparently obligatory ingredients of cruel German counts, each with two wives—old castles—private doors—sliding panels—banditti—assassins—ghosts &c. This mixture, it...
Literary responses
Anna Maria Mackenzie
It provoked the Critical to extended complaint about the pains of reviewing. Nothing, it said, was so harrassing and tedious as a novel without a plan like this,
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
1: 684
in which detached scenes of...
Leisure and Society
Eliza Lynn Linton
In London, Eliza Lynn drank in artistic life. She championed the singing of Jenny Lind
against those who preferred Alboni or Malibran. She performed for Samuel Laurence
the role of uninformed art critic or foolometer...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Robinson
It is set in France, and voices anti-Catholic sentiments. The poetry quoted in it (by poets of the Graveyard School like Edward Young
, Thomas Gray
, and Edward Young
, as well as...
Intertextuality and Influence
Catherine Cuthbertson
The mode is that of Ann Radcliffe
. The names of the characters are all Italian, though the French or Spanish setting implied by the title is reflected in the appearance in the text of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mrs Martin
In ReginaldMM
praises the work of Ann Radcliffe
and takes her as a model (saying, however, that she does not aspire to rival her). Her story abounds in gothic motifs: convents, secret passages, banditti...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Scudgell Wilkinson
A minor character in this novel sums up rules of the gothic genre to which it belongs: a castle, a turret, a winding staircase, an assassin, a suicide, a spectre . . . ingredients enough...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Damer
This is a novel strong in piety as well as in sentiment. Its title-page quotes from Ann Radcliffe
. The heroine, Miss Lousia Riversdale, relates her story in journal letters to her brother Sir Harry...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Julia Young
Elinor's father is killed in defence of his daughter's honour.
Young, Mary Julia. The East Indian, or Clifford Priory. Earle and Hemet.
4: 189
She spends time unhappily at Clifford Priory with her skinflint uncle Sir Gervas, who goes to bed at nine, expects Elinor to eat...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Austen
Despite some later revision, Northanger Abbey is essentially (like its ancestor Susan) a novel of the 1790s, a spoof of both the gothic and romance modes which were then all the rage. Austen's specific...
Intertextuality and Influence
Eliza Fay
Her range of reference runs from Pope
on the one hand to, on the other, Ann Radcliffe
and an anonymous answerer of Hannah More
, the author of Nubilia in Search of a Husband.
Forster, E. M., and Eliza Fay. “Introductory Note”. Original Letters from India, Hogarth Press, pp. 7-24.
10
Intertextuality and Influence
Margaret Kennedy
MK
found the inspiration for this novel in Jane Austen
's satire of gothic melodrama, Northanger Abbey. The tragic melodrama of this novel's love stories, however, brings it closer to the actual gothic tradition...
Intertextuality and Influence
Eleanor Sleath
It is set in a moated castle in seventeenth-century Gascony, with a dissipated Count who mistreats and imprisons his wife, banishes his wife's orphan nephew (the hero, Theodore), and has his niece Adelaide kidnapped...
