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.
Reviewers were anything but indifferent. The New Monthly Magazine thought the title character ably and vigorously drawn and the book therefore a moral one: a fearful beacon to warn the young and inexperienced. But 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...
Literary responses
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
The Times did indeed review it, and using the extended metaphor of a hunt, pronounced it a good galloping novel . . . to be enjoyed rather than criticised,
Times. Times Publishing Company.
(18 November 1862): 4
and praised...
Literary responses
Sarah Harriet Burney
Charles Burney
, too, slighted his youngest daughter's work in comparison with the elder's.
Burney, Sarah Harriet. “Editor’s Introduction”. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, edited by Lorna J. Clark, Georgia University Press.
lxii
Jane Austen
later noted that Clarentine seemed good on the first reading, not so good on the second, and unnatural...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Cassandra Cooke
In a preface CC
says she found the incident that forms the centre of this novel in The Christian Life by Dr John Scott
(that is The Christian Life, from its beginning to its consummation...
Intertextuality and Influence
Henry James
Ann Radcliffe
's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Charlotte Brontë
's Jane Eyre have been cited as possible sources.
Gale, Robert L. A Henry James Encyclopedia. Greenwood.
682
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Catherine Cuthbertson
The mode is that of Ann Radcliffe
. The names of the characters are all Italian, though the French or Spanish setting implied by the title is reflected in the appearance in the text of...
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...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Damer
This is a novel strong in piety as well as in sentiment. Its title-page quotes from Ann Radcliffe
. The heroine, Miss Lousia Riversdale, relates her story in journal letters to her brother Sir Harry...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Austen
Despite some later revision, Northanger Abbey is essentially (like its ancestor Susan) a novel of the 1790s, a spoof of both the gothic and romance modes which were then all the rage. Austen's specific...
Intertextuality and Influence
Eliza Fay
Her range of reference runs from Pope
on the one hand to, on the other, Ann Radcliffe
and an anonymous answerer of Hannah More
, the author of Nubilia in Search of a Husband.
Forster, E. M., and Eliza Fay. “Introductory Note”. Original Letters from India, Hogarth Press, pp. 7-24.
