Ann Radcliffe

Biography
Radcliffe was born Ann Ward in Holborn. At the age of 22, she married journalist William Radcliffe, owner and editor of the English Chronicle, in Bath in 1788. The couple was childless and, to amuse herself, she began to write fiction, which her husband encouraged.

She published The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne in 1789. It set the tone for the majority of her work, which tended to involve innocent, but heroic young women who find themselves in gloomy, mysterious castles ruled by even more mysterious barons with dark pasts.

Her works were extremely popular among the upper class and the growing middle class, especially among young women. Her works included A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1796). She published a travelogue, "A Journey Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany" in 1795.

The success of The Romance of the Forest established Radcliffe as the leading exponent of the historical Gothic romance. Her later novels met with even greater attention, and produced many imitators, and famously, Jane Austen's burlesque of The Mysteries of Udolpho in Northanger Abbey, as well as influencing the works of Sir Walter Scott.

Stylistically, Radcliffe was noted for her vivid descriptions of exotic and sinister locales, though in reality the author had rarely or never visited the actual locations. Shy by nature, she did not encourage her fame and abandoned literature as a pursuit.

She died on February 7, 1823 from respiratory problems probably caused by pneumonia. She was buried in Saint George's Church, Hanover Square in London.


[edit] In popular culture
Paul Féval, père used her as his protagonist in the novel La Ville Vampire (translated as Vampire City).

In the film Becoming Jane, she is portrayed by Helen McCrory, in a scene where she meets Jane Austen and encourages her to embark on a writing career (there is no historical evidence of such a meeting, though as noted Radcliffe's works had clearly influenced Austen's).

A biography of Radcliffe, by Deborah Rogers, was published in 1996.


[edit] Influence on later writers
Jane Austen
William Makepeace Thackeray
Sir Walter Scott
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Percy Bysshe Shelley
John Keats
Lord Byron
Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit (1855-7)
Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1860)
The Brontës
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847)
Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1938)
Witold Gombrowicz's Possessed, or The Secret of Myslotch: A Gothic Novel (1939)
Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Oval Portrait" drew from Udolpho and mentions Radcliffe by name (somewhat disparagingly) in the introduction.

[edit] Publications include
The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1 volume), 1789, gothic novel. ISBN 0-19-282357-4
A Sicilian Romance (2 vols.) 1790, gothic novel. ISBN 0-19-283666-8
The Romance of the Forest (3 vols.) 1791, gothic novel. ISBN 0-19-283713-3
The Mysteries of Udolpho (4 vols.) 1794. ISBN 0-19-282523-2
The Italian (3 vols.) 1797. ISBN 0-14-043754-1
Gaston de Blondeville (4 vols.) 1826, reprinted in 2006 by Valancourt Books ISBN 0-9777841-0-X