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.
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...
Textual Features
Vita Sackville-West
VSW
has a sharp eye for women in history, for non-noble individuals who touched the story of Knole. As well as queens, duchesses, and countesses, she provides lively sketches of the actresses Nell Gwyn
and...
Birth
James Malcolm Rymer
JMR
was born in the Holborn district of London. He was baptized on the 30th of October at St Andrew's, Holborn, the same church where Ann Ward
(later famous as the gothic novelist Ann...
Education
Christina Rossetti
Christina and her siblings were educated by their mother
, in reading, writing, the Bible and rudimentary French. The boys were sent to school when they were seven, while the girls continued at home. Their...
Textual Production
Christina Rossetti
In 1856, CR
published an historical short story, The Lost Titian, in The Crayon, a small magazine published in New York.
Smulders, Sharon. Christina Rossetti Revisited. Twayne.
100
Marsh, Jan. Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life. Viking.
176-9
. She also wrote some non-fiction on Italian writers (including...
Publishing
Regina Maria Roche
The usual US and Irish editions followed, plus a French translation. Valancourt Books
of Chicago (a Gothic reprint house named after the hero of Ann Radcliffe
's The Mysteries of Udolpho) has recently re-issued this novel.
Literary responses
Regina Maria Roche
The Critical Review was reminded unpleasantly of Ann Radcliffe
(from whom, indeed, says Rictor Norton
in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, passages are lifted without acknowledgement).
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
The Critical summed up this novel as...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
