49 Ann Radcliffe.Pdf

.Ann 'Rgdcliffe (1764-1823) Ann Radcliffe is best known today as the founder of an exceedingly in fluential and popular school of gothic fiction whose villains prefigured the Byronic hero and whose success inspired many imitations and parodies, the best known among them Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. During the 1790s Radcliffe was the best-selling of all British novelists-read and translated more than any other. When she died, the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Mis cellany observed, "Mrs Radcliffe has long borne undisputed, an almost solitary sway over the regions of romance." 1 Walter Scott said, "Mrs Radcliffe has a title to be considered as the first poetess of romantic fiction." 2 But Radcliffe's personal history is as obscure as her fame was wide. The Edinburgh Review noted that "the fair authoress kept herself almost as much incognito as the Author of Waverley; nothing was known of her but her name on the title page. She never appeared in public, nor mingled in private society, but kept herself apart, like the sweet bird that sings its solitary notes." 3 This may have been a slight exaggeration, but many years after Radcliffe's death, when Christina Rossetti attempted a biography of her predecessor, whom she admired, she was forced to give up the project for lack of information about her reclusive subject. To this day, because of Radcliffe's self-imposed seclusion only basic infor mation is available about her life. She was born in London on 9 July 1764, the only daughter of Ann Oates and William Ward, a businessman. A frequent visitor was her uncle, Thomas Bentley, a widely traveled, liberal, highly cul tured man and partner ofJosiah Wedgwood. He introduced Ann to. Elizabeth Montagu and Hester Lynch Piozzi. Ann was living at Bath during the time when Sophia and Harriet Lee were running their school, but whether she attended is unclear. Judging from the epigraphs and allusions {n her work, she I. 18 (1826) : 703. 2. Quoted in Robert Miles, Ann Radcl!ffe: The Great Enchantress (Manchester, 1995), 7. 3. 76 (May 1823): 36on. Ann Radcl!ffe 557 read all of the standard eighteenth-century poets and was steeped in Shake speare. She seems to have held conservative views on politics and religion but opposed the slave trade. In 1787 at Bath she married William Radcliffe, an Oxford graduate and law student. Soon afterward the couple moved to London, where William became owner and editor of the English Chronicle. During the evenings, editorial work frequently demanded William's time, leaving Ann on her own. He had admired the prose sketches of scenery she had been in the habit of composing and encouraged her to spend her solitary time writing. Within two years of her marriage, which seems to have been a happy one, she produced The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), a melodramatic tale with a medieval setting. A Sicilian Romatue followed in 1790. Both novels were published anonymously, and both were given a lukewarm critical re ception. The Romance of the Forest: Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry (1791) represented an artistic advance over the earlier works, and the reviews were more positive. By 1795 it had gone through four editions, had been trans lated into Italian and French, and had been adapted for the stage by John Boaden (Fountainville Forest, 1794). It was in an advertisement for the second edition of The Romance of the Forest that Radcliffe's name was first linked to her fiction. The Mysteries of Udolpho, A Romance; Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry, for which Cadell paid her five hundred pounds, took the world by storm, becoming a sensation not only in Britain but on the Continent as well. Radcliffe was now established as a major novelist. Radcliffe's work owes much not only to Renaissance romance but to the early novels of Charlotte Smith. Both authors write about virtuous women of sensibility who are isolated within and threatened by a cold, aristocratic patriarchy, whose dangers they meet with quiet courage. Radcliffe also drew on Clara Reeve's Old English Baron (1777), Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1765), and Sophia Lee's Recess (1783-85), but although she used many stan dard conventions, such as secret passageways, gloomy castles, and claustro phobic spaces, Radcliffe's gothicism was distinctively her own. She was one of the most skillful practitioners of the art of suspense, interweaving complex plots and often keeping readers hanging for hundreds of pages. For depictions of a consciousness subjected to terror her writing is unsurpassed. Her hero ines are passionate about music and picturesque landscapes but also studious, proper, and sensitive. Her fiction explores the realm of female fantasy, and the psyches of her heroines, sometimes pushed to the extremes of human emo tion, are drawn with psychological sophistication. Her villains are brooding, dark, authoritarian male characters who imprison the heroines and threaten sexual violation. There is always a loyal servant, and the antics of laboring- Ann Radcliffe ~~~~- -~~~~~~~~~~~~~ class characters often provide comic relief to the suspense. Radcliffe's clever, self-reliant, and gutsy heroines emerge triumphant from their travails, physi cally unscathed, and reunited with their true loves. Apparently supernatural events inspire terror but are eventually rationally explained. However, her ghosts are generally more convincing than her explanations. Tension between the allure of imagination and feeling and the need for rational control infuses her plots. Thus, her heroines are women of sensibility who are also tough minded and resolute. Several of her heroines write poetry, which is inserted in the narrative and operates both to delay the action (thereby increasing suspense) and to examine the act and context of women's poetic composition. During the summer of 1794 Radcliffe and her husband journeyed down the Rhine to the Swiss border, where they were turned back for bureaucratic reasons. Thus, Radcliffe never set foot in Switzerland or Italy and never got to see for herself the landscapes that are the settings for much of her fiction; she knew them only from pictures and travel literature. She and William returned to England and contented themselves with a tour of the Lake Dis trict. Ann Radcliffe published her impressions in A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, Through Holland and the Western Frontier ef Germany, With a Return Down the Rhine: To Which Are Added Observations During a Tour to the Lakes ef Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland (1795). Samuel Taylor Coleridge remarked, "In reviewing the Mysteries of Udolpho, we hazarded an opinion, that, if a better production could appear, it must come only from the pen of Mrs. Radcliffe." 4 Radcliffe received the enormous sum of eight hundred pounds for her next novel, The Italian, or the Confes sional ef the Black Penitents. A Romance (1797). John Boaden wrote a dramatic adaptation entitled the Italian Monk, which was produced on 15 August 1797 at the Haymarket Theatre in London. Despite such critical, popular, and eco nomic success, at the age of only thirty-three Radcliffe stopped publishing, though she would live another two and a half decades. Many rumours circu lated about why Radcliffe abandoned her writing career at the height of her fame. Some reported her to be disgusted by her imitators or appalled by her own celebrity. Others alleged that an overexuberant and morbid imagination had caused her death or led to madness. She was said to be in Derbyshire, confined in Haddon Hall. Radcliffe felt it indecorous to explain her silence or reply to rumors of her mental or physical demise. In truth, she had inherited money when her father died that left her financially independent, with no further incentive to put her name before the public. After Radcliffe died of an asthma attack on 7 February 1823, the New 4. Critical Review, n.s., 23 (June 1798): 166-69. Ann Radcl!ffe 559 Monthly Magazine claimed that she had died "under a gradual decay of her mental and bodily powers." 5 Although Radcliffe stopped publishing, she con tinued to write for pleasure in the last quarter-century of her life; her last novel, Gaston de Blondeville, was composed in 1802. It is the only one of her novels in which the supernatural is not rationally explained away in the end. Her husband published it, along with a memoir and other of her works, in Gaston de Blondeville, or the Court of Henry III Keeping Festival in Ardenne, a Romance. St. A/ban's Abbey, a Mefrical Tale with Some Poetical Pieces (1826). Although the poetic nature of Radcliffe's verbal landscapes is acknowl edged in critical commentary, that she was a poet seems all but forgotten in our time. But Walter Scott pointed to A Sicilian Romance (1790) as the first example in modern English of the poetic novel.6 And Radcliffe herself con sidered poetry such an essential part of her fiction that the titles of her two most important novels make specific reference to the poems within them - The Romance of the Forest: Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho, A Romance; Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry (1794). Moreover, the volume containing Gaston de Blondeville includes a lengthy metrical tale along with other poetic pieces. Leigh Hunt said of Radcliffe that "in her verses she is a tinselled nymph in a pantomime, calling up commonplaces with a wand";7 in fact, her poetry was astonishingly innovative in its experimentation with freer form and lan guage. Poetry plays an essential function in the novels, setting mood, illumi nating the interior landscape of characters, and describing the conditions for imaginative production, among other things.

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