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 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 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 Elizabeth Isabella Spence
She begins with Wales (whose countryside she praises but whose peasants she fairly sweepingly dismisses).
Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Summer Excursions. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1809, 2 vols.
1: 24-5
Although her title-page does not name it, she returned to Wales on a later journey, and devotes a...
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 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...
Literary responses Isabella Kelly
The Critical made a basic misjudgement of The Abbey of St. Asaph (seemingly paying more attention to title than to content): it listed all the appurtenances of the Radcliffe an novel, with which it said...
Literary responses Charlotte Dacre
Zofloya was widely reviewed and its language widely condemned as bombastical—probably reflecting unease at its rampant female sexuality. Shocked reviews included those in the Literary Journal and Monthly Literary Recreations, though the Morning...
Literary responses Isabella Kelly
This novel was praised by the British Critic as entitled to no mean place among the better productions of this description.
qtd. in
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press, 2000, 2 vols.
The interesting characters, gripping incident, and unaffected language were singled out for praise.
qtd. in
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press, 2000, 2 vols.
Frederick S. Frank
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...

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