Ann Radcliffe

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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.
Black and white photograph of a painting of Ann Radcliffe, shown from the waist up, wearing a dark dress with a light frilled collar. Her curly hair is topped with a large hat that is decorated with flowers.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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...
Textual Features Mary Julia Young
MJY foregrounds her own friendship with Anna Maria Crouch, and finds room for such details as the opinions of Crouch's father, Peregrine Phillips , about novelists: he admired Charlotte Smith , Anna Maria Bennett ,...
Literary responses Sarah Scudgell Wilkinson
George Saintsbury in 1913 developed an attack on this book as very nearly consummate in badness. . . . a fair example of the worst imitations of Mrs. Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis conjointly, though without...
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...
Textual Production Sarah Scudgell Wilkinson
As Miss Wilkinson, SSW published Convent of Grey Penitents; or, The Apostate Nun. A Romance.
The sub-title had appeared already the previous year on a chapbook entitled The Mysterious Novice; or, Convent of...
Textual Features Jane West
JW uses heroic couplets for formal poems like To the Island of Sicily (on the retreat of the king and queen of the Two Sicilies before the French Army of Italy, commanded by Napoleon ...
Education Rose Tremain
At this stage of her life, Rosie's great interest and talent was not writing but painting, like her sister. She set out to make a huge, hanging, illustrated copy of Keats 's Ode to Autumn...
Textual Production Rose Tremain
It was the herculean school project of putting on a dramatic adaptation of Ann Radcliffe 's Udolpho that first give RT (who thought of herself at the time as a visual artist like her sister)...
Reception Elizabeth Isabella Spence
Rictor Norton says that this text is derivative from Ann Radcliffe 's A Sicilian Romance.
Norton, Rictor. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. Leicester University Press.
207
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Isabella Spence
She begins with Wales (whose countryside she praises but whose peasants she fairly sweepingly dismisses).
Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Summer Excursions. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme.
1: 24-5
Although her title-page does not name it, she returned to Wales on a later journey, and devotes a...
Textual Production Joanna Southcott
Having had her attention drawn to Ann Radcliffe 's The Romance of the Forest, JS wrote (or received as dictated by the Spirit) a lengthy prose-and-verse commentary.
Norton, Rictor. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. Leicester University Press.
90-1
Intertextuality and Influence Charlotte Smith
The Critical Review, reviewing this book, called CS a sister-queen
Fletcher, Loraine. Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography. Macmillan.
141
of the novel with Frances Burney . William Enfield in the Monthly praised it warmly.
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
1: 548
Wollstonecraft , probable author of the...
Literary responses Charlotte Smith
On the strength of this novel the Critical Review hailed CS as less agitating than Ann Radcliffe , less diverting than Frances Burney , but more true to nature than either. In the Monthly...
Education Elizabeth Smith
From an early age Elizabeth supplemented whatever teaching she could gain by eager study for herself. She seems to have regarded reading and writing as intensely private pursuits: she told Lady Isabella King that she...
Literary responses Eleanor Sleath
The Critical Review observed crushingly that vapid and servile imitations like this one were a severe penance for critics who had been seduced by Ann Radcliffe into admiration for the modern romance.
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
1: 761
Jane Austen

Timeline

9 July 1775: Matthew Gregory Lewis, later famous as the...

Writing climate item

9 July 1775

Matthew Gregory Lewis , later famous as the leading Gothic novelist of horror, was born on the eleventh birthday of Ann Radcliffe , leading Gothic novelist of terror.

By 22 July 1797: William Beckford published a second and more...

Women writers item

By 22 July 1797

William Beckford published a second and more marked burlesque attack on women's writing: Azemia: A Descriptive and Sentimental Novel. Interspersed with Pieces of Poetry.

9 July 1798: George Canning, writing in the Anti-Jacobin,...

Women writers item

9 July 1798

George Canning , writing in the Anti-Jacobin, lambasted sensibility as a literary mode stemming from France, from Rousseau , and from diseased fancy, effeminacy, and self-obsession.

1804: The publisher George, George, and John Robinson,...

Writing climate item

1804

The publisher George, George, and John Robinson , whose list of women writers had been distinguished, went bankrupt.

1814: John Colin Dunlop published The History of...

Writing climate item

1814

John Colin Dunlop published The History of Fiction: Being a Critical Account of the Most Celebrated Prose Works of Fiction, from the Earliest Greek Romances to the Novels of the Present Age.

Early 1818: William Hazlitt opened On the Living Poets,...

Writing climate item

Early 1818

William Hazlitt opened On the Living Poets, the last of his Lectures on the English Poets, with a statement on gender issues.

Texts

Radcliffe, Ann. A Journey made in the Summer of 1794. G. G. and J. Robinson, 1795.
Radcliffe, Ann. A Sicilian Romance. T. Hookham, 1790.
Radcliffe, Ann. Gaston de Blondeville. Henry Colburn, 1826.
Radcliffe, Ann. “Introduction and Explanatory Notes”. A Sicilian Romance, edited by Alison Milbank, Oxford University Press, 1993, p. Various Pages.
Radcliffe, Ann. The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne. T. Hookham, 1789.
Radcliffe, Ann. The Italian. T. Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies , 1797.
Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. G. G. and J. Robinson, 1794.
Radcliffe, Ann. The Poems of Mrs. A. Radcliffe. J. Bouden, 1815.
Radcliffe, Ann. The Romance of the Forest. T. Hookham and J. Carpenter, 1791.