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 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...
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 Charlotte Smith
The Critical Review, reviewing this book, called CS a sister-queen
qtd. in
Fletcher, Loraine. Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography. Macmillan, 1998.
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, 2000, 2 vols.
1: 548
Wollstonecraft , probable author of the...
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...
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 Sarah Green
A review in La Belle Assemblée called this a Radcliffean imitation which its author need not be ashamed of.
Green, Sarah. “Introduction: Romantic Reading and Writing: The Creation and Consumption of the Early Nineteenth-Century Novel; A Note on the Text”. Romance Readers and Romance Writers, edited by Christopher Goulding, Pickering and Chatto, 2010, p. ix - xxii, xxix-xxxi.
x
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.
qtd. in
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press, 2000, 2 vols.
1: 761
Jane Austen
Literary responses Joanna Baillie
The Critical Review assumed the author was male. It thought the versification monotonous but warmly praised both preface and plays.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
24 (1798): 1-22
Initial reaction from individuals (mostly favourable) concentrated on the puzzle of authorship...
Literary responses Lady Caroline Lamb
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 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...
Literary responses Elizabeth Hervey
The Critical Review once again praised the style and characters. It judged the novel too long and its plot too complicated, but that the whole was certainly superior to the majority of flimsy publications of...
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 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...
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, 1997.
lxii
Jane Austen later noted that Clarentine seemed good on the first reading, not so good on the second, and unnatural...
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...

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