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.
The Critical made a basic misjudgement of The Abbey of St. Asaph (seemingly paying more attention to title than to content): it listed all the appurtenances of the Radcliffe
an novel, with which it said...
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
Sophia King
SK
set her birth name to this novel, which she presumably arranged for before her wedding in July. The British Library
has a copy, N 2048. SK
provides a spirited preface on the part played...
Literary responses
Lady Caroline Lamb
Reviewers were anything but indifferent. The New Monthly Magazine thought the title character ably and vigorously drawn and the book therefore a moral one: a fearful beacon to warn the young and inexperienced. But the...
Friends, Associates
Harriet Lee
HL
, like her sister, was personally friendly with many other writers of her day: Jane
and Anna Maria Porter
, Ann Radcliffe
(even though the latter probably did not, as often reported, attend the...
Occupation
Sophia Lee
In 1795 SL
subscribed, as Miss Lee of Belvedere and clearly for the use of the school, to James Marshall's Library
of Bath, a circulating library with a comparatively small proportion of fiction in its...
Friends, Associates
Sophia Lee
Their school, together with their literary careers, brought SL
and her sisters a wide circle of friends and contacts, including Jane
and Anna Maria Porter
. The novelist Elizabeth Sophia Tomlins describes Sophia as surrounded...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sophia Lee
The Recess was highly influential: in its basic technique of inserting fictive persons among actual historical ones, in its polarization of Elizabeth
and Mary
, and in its heavily sentimental tone. Writers directly influenced by...
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anna Maria Mackenzie
AMM
's opening address To the Readers of Modern Romance says that ancient romance was put paid to by the new source of amusement . . . struck out by Henry Fielding
and Richardson
(to...
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...
Education
Anne Marsh
She was not taught religion until she was five, and if her mother had not thought her a forward child she would have waited another year. It was a maxim of my Mother that children...
