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.
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...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Meeke
The notice in the Critical Review betrayed impatience with this novel: it was particularly displeased with the proliferation of dukes and duchesses, marquisses and marchionesses, the bad grammar, and the libellous view of the abodes...
Textual Production
Mary Russell Mitford
MRM
was pursuing the idea of dramatising Ann Radcliffe
's posthumous novel, Gaston de Blondeville; two months later she had her version drafted.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
A few years later, as a published author, MRM
became friendly with James Perry
(editor of the Morning Chronicle). At his house she met a number of eminent men: politicians Lord Brougham
and Lord Erskine
Intertextuality and Influence
Harriett Mozley
Among the children, Fanny is a literature-addict, who fancies she would like to be a nun, because a nun is the most unfortunate and interesting creature in the world! . . . they all look...
Textual Features
Sarah Murray
Murray then divides her volume into three parts: A Guide to the Lakes . . . and . . . the West Riding of Yorkshire, A Guide to the Beauties of Scotland, and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Judith Sargent Murray
She backs this pleasure in modernity with a remarkable grasp of former female history and of the women's literary tradition in English and its contexts. She mentions the Greek foremother Sappho
, the patriotic heroism...
Textual Features
Eliza Parsons
The story is set in Germany (which at this date was seen in England as the land of romance)
Hoeveler, Diane Long, and Eliza Parsons. “Introduction”. The Castle of Wolfenbach, edited by Diane Long Hoeveler and Diane Long Hoeveler, Valancourt Books, p. vii - xvii.
x
and the heroine, Matilda Weimar, appears to be German, though she turns out to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Eliza Parsons
This novel is part-epistolary (all the letters being in continuation from the Scottish Anna Sidney—who later becomes Lady Kilmorney—to her older friend Mrs Grenville), partly in dialogue, partly in the form of Anna's journal, and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Pearson
Several poems treat events in history: not only Henry II
of England but also the Protestant Henri IV of France
. The latter's victory over the Catholic League at the battle of Ivry in 1590...
Family and Intimate relationships
Mary Ann Radcliffe
She later wrote sardonically of her elopement and marriage: Well! all this seemed vastly like a novel.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
She had eight children, the first (she says) when she was still only fifteen. Of these Ann, Mary...
Textual Production
Mary Ann Radcliffe
At the time of its appearance, MAR
was not yet a published author. At the time of its ascription to her, she had published in defence in women, while Ann Radcliffe
had completed her whole...
Textual Production
Mary Ann Radcliffe
Again she was a published author by the time of the ascription, but not at the time of the publication, and only of material quite unlike this highly-coloured fiction. Contemporary comment on both these novels...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Maria Riddell
The diary records some of her literary tastes: she copied there a letter expressing her dislike of tragedies (which, no matter how moral, she felt to be harmful to the mind because of the violent...
