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.
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
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Mary Matilda Betham
Here already MMB evinces her interest in women's literary history: her topics include praise for writers including Ann Radcliffe and the Ladies of Llangollen (Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby ). One of the...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Barbara Hofland
BH also pays much attention in her poems to other writers. Stanzas to the River Don footnotes Wortley Hall as a former home of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu .
Hofland, Barbara. Poems. Printed by J. Montgomery, and sold by Vernor and Hood.
6-11 and n
Ode to Apathy...
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...
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Julia Kavanagh
In this second work of women's literary history, JK once again limits herself to the novel. Her canon comprises ten authors, from Aphra Behn to Sydney Morgan by way of Sarah Fielding , Frances Burney
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Anne Katharine Elwood
Some of the British women writers discussed in the text remain well-known, but others have slipped into obscurity. Memoirs includes: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu , Griselda Murray , Frances Seymour, Lady Hertford , Hester Lynch Piozzi
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Clara Balfour
In her general overview of the history of English literature during these centuries, she focuses especially on English poets because as she says, great poets not only give form, power and beauty to a nation's...
Textual Production Henrietta Maria Bowdler
HMB 's letters to Sarah Ponsonby reveal the closeness of their friendship. She sent information, opinion, and verse, some of it probably written by herself. Among books she discussed were Ann Radcliffe 's The Mysteries...
Textual Production Lady Eleanor Butler
Sarah Ponsonby bequeathed the journals to Caroline Hamilton , and Harriet Pigott therefore supposed that they were written by Ponsonby .
Butler, Lady Eleanor et al. “Foreword and Editorial Materials”. The Hamwood Papers of the Ladies of Llangollen and Caroline Hamilton, edited by Eva Mary Bell, Macmillan, p. vii - viii; various pages.
vii
They have been published in several selections: by Mrs G. H. [Eva Mary] Bell
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)...
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...
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 Production Maria Jane Jewsbury
MJJ took occasion, in a review of Joanna Baillie for the Athenæum, to praise not only Baillie but also Ann Radcliffe , Elizabeth Inchbald , and Mary Wollstonecraft .
Wilkes, Joanne. “’Only the broken music’? The Critical Writings of Maria Jane Jewsbury”. Women’s Writing, Vol.
7
, No. 1, pp. 105-18.
115
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.
2: 60-1, 62-3

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.