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.
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
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
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 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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
